Mondo Celluloid - Review

THE SPIRIT

The Spirit had potential: the cinematography and art direction were killer, the cast was made up primarily of attractive women, and the titular hero (played by Gabriel Macht) gets to live out every adolescent boy’s fantasy of derring-do, sexual magnetism, and indestructibility. So far, so good. Had The Spirit been a silent movie, it might have been successful, or at least interesting, but unfortunately writer-director Frank Miller’s screenplay is lousy.

Lousy.

Bad Mickey Spillane tough-guy dialogue falls out of everyone’s mouth and clunks onto the floor; the plot, involved ancient Greek artifacts (don’t ask) is thin and silly; and we in the audience are asked - repeatedly - to ignore sizable inconsistencies in the story. Spoiler Alert: to name but one, we’re supposed to believe that the female doctor with whom The Spirit carries one of several implied affairs does not recognize him as her deceased husband Denny Colt. A trained surgeon! Does not recognize! Her husband’s zombie penis!

It’s not all bad: there are some funny lines, though the groaner-to-zinger ratio is depressingly high, and there are a couple of amusing bits of business, the funniest being when The Spirit goes looking for Sand Saref (played by Eva Mendes) by flashing a photocopy of her ass (again, don’t ask) at hotel doormen. Samuel L. Jackson is effective as the villainous Octopus, the girls (Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, and a heavily backlit Jaime King) are spectacular to look at, and Macht (best known, I suppose, for…uh…) is clearly having a good time as the womanizing boob-cum-zombie philosopher and hero.

Still all these elements never quite coalesce, and as a result The Spirit feels a lot like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Speed Racer, movies that share the same glossy, absurd, and frustratingly not-quite-there-ness. The Spirit is very much like one of the femmes fatales populating Central City: beautiful to look at, half-witty, and virtually soulless.

- Andrew Roberts, 12-28-08