Courtesy of Lionsgate

A Sight For Sore Eisner | Gabriel Macht should be thankful he gets to remain masked in every scene of The Spirit.

The Spirit

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THE SPIRIT
Directed by Frank Miller. Starring Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson. Opens Thu, Dec 25.
-NO STARS-

The most painless way to review The Spirit would be to make a list of all the things wrong with it (everything) and just leave it at that, but then all references to the terrible over-the-top acting, atrocious dialogue, and pointless use of computer animation would have no context. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really provide any context for its well-below-amateur-level filmmaking and acting, unless being the most abominable movie of the decade counts.

Based on Will Eisner’s comic book series, The Spirit is (allegedly) the story of the titular crimefighter (Gabriel Macht) who watches over Central City and does battle with the (supposedly) evil Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). The film’s writer and director, Frank Miller, opts to continue with the high-contrast, overly stylized presentation that he and Robert Rodriguez used to successfully create campy noir in Sin City. But Sin City was based on Miller’s own comics, and that film’s look, for better or worse, was derived from his actual artwork; the same cannot be said of The Spirit, as Eisner’s original drawings resemble colourful Sunday cartoons as opposed to gritty crime sagas. This leaves me thinking that Miller was hoping to leave his own personal stamp on the film adaptation. Well, congratulations, Mr. Miller: your trademark is the stench of incompetence.

Like many failed screen versions of comics, The Spirit forgets — rather, never comprehends — that it is supposed to be an adaptation to film and not a projection of comic book panels onto a screen. This is the only way to explain why Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson were cast as femme fatales Sand Saref and Silken Floss, as they are two actresses better known for their curves than, well, anything else. Miller is so eager to showcase their physical assets that Johansson’s cleavage and Mendes’ derrière could rightly receive top billing. (At one point Mendes sits on a photocopier and hits the start button.)

Crediting body parts rather than people would actually make sense, because everyone who gets dialogue sounds as if they were delivering it in their first afterschool improv class. Whether it’s Miller’s screenplay or his direction that’s at fault (if not both), somebody involved in the production of this film should have told him that he was making not a movie, but a childish mishmash of awful slapstick humour, unintelligible (fight) scenes, and repeated allusions to Nazi sympathy. Let me elaborate on this last point: Samuel L. Jackson and Johansson don German army fatigues, complete with swastika arm patches, and stand in front of a giant photo of Hitler. This has nothing to do with anything else in the movie.

It’s never clear if The Spirit is trying to be a parody of a parody of itself, but it’s definitely never funny, not even because it is so terrible. Why this movie has the audacity to leave itself open to a sequel is also a mystery. The only certainty is that Frank Miller should never be allowed to work in Hollywood again.