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Apr 15, 2009 Web Exclusive By Nick Hyman

The Spirit Blu-ray/Two-Disc Special Edition DVD (Lionsgate)

Some properties shouldn’t be adapted period, and some properties shouldn’t be adapted by Frank Miller. I’ve always thought of comic book writer Miller (Sin City, The Dark Knight Returns) as a mostly one-trick pony who relishes extreme violence, the objectification of women, and more violence; I would place his screenplay for Robocop 2 very high (or low) in the pantheon of worst sequels ever, killing one of the best postmodern takes on Frankenstein to date. But I digress. The Spirit is complete garbage.

The movie assumes that everybody already knows who The Spirit actually is. There’s really no explanation as to what his motivation is. He’s just there and he doesn’t like bad guys and there always seems to be a cute cat following him around. The casting is another problem, with relative unknown Gabriel Macht playing the titular character behind a mask most of the time; his performance (as with the rest in the film) is erratic at best. The lack of any discernable direction have Macht and especially Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus grasping at straws and aiming for the cheap seats with amped up performances that frequently surpass camp. Others, including Eva Mendes, Eric Balfour, Scarlett Johansson, and Sarah Paulson, seem to struggle with acting against a mostly green screen set.

There’s a lot of talk on the DVD about how Miller had to do the project to protect the integrity of Will Eisner’s landmark comic book but all that is thrown away when the whole movie is essentially a rip-off of the Miller co-directed Sin City, which at least had Robert Rodriguez pulling off some interesting set pieces. Trading the pulp of the comic for hyperstylized violence was unwise. The problem with shooting many of these new stylized green screen movies is that when everything looks so fake, there’s no suspense. The DVD includes the usual “it’s so weird to act against green screens” spiel we’ve seen a thousand times at this point. Let’s please have a moratorium on this black-and-white-with-red-blood-all-over type of flick and get back to making interesting and believable stories. (www.lionsgate.com)

Author rating: 2/10