Advertisement
Frank Miller’s film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is an elaborately stylized train wreck. It would be easy to see only the glaring dissonances, such as childish one-liners sharing the screen with a scene in which a man is bludgeoned with a severed head, and write off the film entirely. But this wouldn’t do it the justice it deserves. The Spirit is a kind of “what if?” that populates the daydreams of only the most committed comic book nerds, which by some miracle has actually been made into a film. It’s a film that exists to answer an outlandish hypothetical question: what if two of the greatest comic artists of all time, Will Eisner and Frank Miller, teamed up to make a movie?!? Fortunately for Mr. Eisner, he didn’t live to see the result
The plot of the film is really unremarkable, and serves only to deliver the more considered stylistic elements. One of the big questions the film needs to answer, but doesn’t, is whether or not it’s a comedy. And what does “comic” mean here?
In Eisner’s original Spirit comics, noir serials syndicated in newspapers in the 1940s, the two meanings of the word ‘comic’ were not very far apart. While Eisner’s The Spirit did go beyond “the funnies” and into more in-depth material, the tone, in terms of both art and subject matter, was generally light. There were gags, it was okay for villains to be goofy –– comics were comic. Things are very different today, thanks in large park to Frank Miller. Miller’s gritty 1986 adaptation of Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, took the character from Adam West camp to the gritty vigilante we know today in just four issues. In the nineties Miller stunned the comics world again with his violent and unflinching series, Sin City, which resulted in a film adaptation of Sin City co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez that matched the dark aesthetic and brutal violence of the original. Comics, especially Miller’s, are not so comic anymore.
Eisner and Miller do have common ground on which to stand: noir. Both The Spirit and Sin City are derivatives of classic film noir, and for this reason it seems to make sense for Miller to direct an updated film noir using Eisner’s classic source material. Or does it? The Spirit the comic isn’t really a derivative of classic ’40s noir, it actually is ’40s noir, albeit for the page rather than the screen. Miller’s brand of noir truly is derivative, with updates and distortions that render it something completely different than the old detective and dame yarns we all know. Sin City builds an overly stylized world and dares you to inhabit it, forcing you to ask whether people are really that depraved and violent. The Spirit the film, on the other hand, dares you to inhabit a world where you’re forced to ask if people are really that silly.
Much of the dissonance that plagues the film is evident simply by looking at the art of Eisner’s Spirit compared to Miller’s in Sin City. Eisner was a master of classic cartoon lines. The ink flows in a clear and playful way. The lines could describe Mickey Mouse as easily as they could render a dame or a dead body –– Eisner took that classic visual language and pushed it to new places. Miller pushed the medium, too, but Miller’s ink isn’t suited to anything classic or comical. With large chunks of black cut violently by stark white, Miller draws like he’s dipping his pen in his best friend’s bullet-riddled corpse. It looks amazing, but it couldn’t be more different from Eisner. It may seem like this wouldn’t matter –– it’s a live-action film after all –– but it matters a great deal. In directing The Spirit, Miller attempts to force Eisner’s soft, jovial character into his brutal, hard-edged world, and it just does not fit.
The credits of the film roll over a series of drawings of The Spirit, done by Miller. They’re stunning. The masked crusader looks like he would fit right into Sin City’s gritty world, at least on the page. On the screen, it looks like Miller ruined a perfectly good storyboard by turning it into a movie. And yet, The Spirit is still worth seeing, if just to watch Miller try to pull it off.
Kevin Buist
FLAME + CITRON Review
Christopher Campbell
Happy Halloween Links. Today in Film...
Brandon Harris
5 80s Literary Adaptations Worse Than...
Kevin Kelly
John Krasinski, Brief Interviews With...
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog, Now Available in Book Form
Paul Moore
October 31, Karina’s Last Day
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
You nailed it. Yours is the last of about ten reviews that I’ve read online that nailed it just as well, but you nailed it better: You did it more concisely. My compliments.
You are way to kind to this piece of junk picture. It has none of the seedy crime feel of Sin City. Samual Jackson who can be very scary I.e. Pulp Fiction is just boring and stupid in this pidture. He feels about as itimidating as a poodle in a junk yard. With the exception of the last ten minutes all you hoped for from this picture is long lost and you just wish it would end. Thispicture will be out the multiplex by New Years. Rating a 1 on a scale of 10 rather than zero becasue of the last ten minutes.
Wait for The Spirit to come out on video. Then, don’t rent it.
This film sucked from the moment the phone rang. The Spirit gets a call in the middle of the night and what does he do? He gets up and casually walks across a huge flat to get to the phone. Hmmm, has he never received an emergency call in the middle of the night? Why would a crime fighter keep the phone that far away from the bed? Oh, yeah. That’s right. His slow saunter gives us a chance to see him in his underwear.
But worry not. He makes up the time by running along telephone lines in what has to be the most ridiculous effect I’ve ever seen. People were laughing when they weren’t supposed to. Or were they? That’s the trouble with this pic.
Then in the middle of a preposterous fight with the Spirit, the Octopus pulls an old toilet out of the muck and hits him in the head and declares:
“Toilets are funny!”
“No, they are not,” I declared alound. And I was actually cheered as I left the theater and got my money back.
You are being far too kind. The actors give kindergarden like performances, there are no good fight scenes (and the fight scenes that do exist are bad AND silly), the scene running on the telephone lines was ridiculous, there is no screenplay to speak of, Samuel Jackson woudnt’ shutup… I could go on and on. I prayed for that piece of crap to end. After 300, and Sin City, Miller destroyes the Spirit franchise by trying to be the director. Guess what? HE IS NOT! The Spirit TV Movie (u can watch it on Youtube) is low badget, and It’s far superior!
You know what? I liked this movie. I mean maybe it’s partly because I had such low expectations. I was a big fan of Will Eisner’s art when I was a kid and I’m not the biggest fan of Frank Miller. (Or “Sin City” for that matter.) And I had a hard time seeing how they were going to translate the comic into a live action movie. Plus, pretty much every review I read said it was a train wreck so I wasn’t expecting a lot when I went in. But I was pleasantly surprised. People were laughing out loud the night I saw it and I thought it was a lot of fun. Samuel Jackson was fully invested in his character, the movie moves along quickly enough and (Seriously.) every lead female character is hot. (Not that that should be a big consideration, I’m just saying.) Yeah, maybe it has some problems and, yeah, maybe (Maybe, mind you. I said maybe.) Scarlett Johansson is a little stiff. But this really isn’t a bad movie. I sat down last night and watched “The Happening” for the first time and “that” is a bad movie. That is a movie that is across-the-board awful. “The Spirit” is nothing like that. It’s a fine “Buy a 6 pack, pop some popcorn and sit down and lose yourself for a couple hours” movie. It’s not “Milk”, it’s not even “Sin City”, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be lambasted the way it’s been. So I’m wondering if we’ve all been “Dark Knighted”. If any comic book movie that isn’t dark and gritty and “real” (Remember, we’re talking about comic books here right?) is just going to be shot down out of hand.
This is an excellent review. Spot on!
@Barry
Exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, because I realized that at some points it is supposed to be campy, at others, funny, and at still others just plain weird. The fight scene and the “Toilets are funny comment” was an absurd , over the top kind of funny that they were TRYING for.
@Kevin
I don’t understand why everyone gives this movie such bad reviews. I’m sure that the humor isn’t for everyone, but why is it that no-one understands that it is supposed to be funny AND serious at different parts? I gotta say, though, this review was the best I’ve read for this movie, as it recognized that the movie had it’s moments, even if it thought there were less of these moments than I did, and I thank you for that.
@Everyone Else
You people make me sad. You’re complaining that The Spirit wasn’t as gritty as Sin City, and that the effects were ridiculous. IT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE SIN CITY. JUST BECAUSE IT HAS A SIMILAR ARTISTIC SYLE DOES NOT MEAN THE MOVIE HAS TO BE THE SAME MOVIE. Honestly, I think the problem with this movie was that it’s ads sort of portrayed it as a more Sin Cityish, serious movie than it was supposed to be, and drew a crowd of people expecting that. If they had just made it seem like a lighter, funnier movie, I think it would have been received in a much more appreciative way.
OH Barry. You must be a big Spirit fan. It is good that you liked the movie that seems everyone else hated. But good that you found good in that movie. Seems that we are gonna be over saturated with comic movies and I am sure this movie wont be the last critically panned “comic” movie.
Oh by the way. The Happening was not a terrible movie. The concept was good and the death scenes were quite disturbing. The bodies just falling off the roof was a disturbing eerie scene. Marc Wahlberg did his whiny voice that took from his sub par performance. Betty Buckley as the crazy old woman was a great character and she did well.
Just that lame ass explanation and ending was what has people up in stirs over it.
Oh and Scooter.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion just like you are. So telling everyone that they make you sad because they didnt like the movie is quite unfair. It is good that you liked the movie. Go see it again. But people compare it to Sin City for the obvious reasons and in my opinion it is a fair comparison. Seems as Frank Miller was trying to duplicate what Rodriguez hit on the mark with a stylistic original presentation that was Sin City. Miller’s genius is obvious on the page. But it seems that he is doing his hard core fans a disservice to be alone in that director’s chair…just not ready yet.
oh my god what a load of crap this movie was!!!! SHAME on u frank miller!!!
I WANT THE HOUR AND1/2 OF MY LIFE BACK AND SOOO MUCH MORE IN COMPENSATION FOR WATCHING THIS PIECE OF SHIT!!!!! UNCOMPREHENSIBLE PLOT and what’s up with the whole nazi scene, they don’t even ever reference it and what black man would want to dress up as a nazi anyway doesn’tt he know he’s just an ape to them!!!!!