Movie Review: The Spirit

To celebrate the actual New Years Day, we drove to Huntington Beach to see The Spirit, one of the late December releases that we actually wanted to see. Even in spite of the negative reviews. We both enjoyed the look and feel of Frank Miller's other movies, Sin City and 300, so a few less-than-cheerful words from professional critics wasn't go to stop us. And since our friend RG wasn't doing anything other than housecleaning that day, we invited him to join us.

A plainclothes cop makes a call from a deserted waterfront to The Spirit, telling him that something's going down, something involving The Octopus. The Spirit answers that he's on his way, donning his blakc mask, black clothes and birght red tie, then runs and jumps his away through Central City, stopping briefly to help a woman in distress before reaching the waterfront. Once there, he finds the cop who called, lying in a pool of blood with two bullet holes to the chest. But before he can find out what happened, The Octopus gleefully attacks, taunting The Spirit with the clues as to who he really is while the two battle each other to exhaustion. The Octopus makes his getaway, leaving The Spirit with unanswered questions as to his origins.

And at that point, I lost quite a bit of interest in the film. The script was terrible, coming across as a sad attempt at filmnoirspeak but devoid of the appeal that Humprey Bogart or James Cagney brought to similar words. Most of the acting was stiff, especially from Scarlett Johansson as The Octopus' assistant Silken Floss; she can do -- and has done -- so much better. Though I will say that I liked Samuel L. Jackson's over-the-top Octopus. He seemed to delight in the corny dialogue and made me like his character. And yes, Gabriel Macht was a decent Spirit. I just wish he would have cleared his throat every so often to get rid of that phlegmmy sound.

On a good note, I loved the art direction. The muted pastels bordering on black and white, the emphasis on the color red, the comic book style of the movie.

But that wasn't enough to win me over, and I couldn't wait to run from the theater after it was all over.

We discussed The Spirit on the walk back to the car, and I was outvoted in my claim that this was probably the worst film of 2008. CM, though not a huge fan of it, did enjoy himself and the cheesiness of it all; RG loved the story, the action, almost everything about it.

Image from Comic Book Movie.