Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Review: The Spirit


The spirit

Starring Gabriel Macht Samuel L. Jackson Scarlett Johansson

Based on The Spirit by Will Eisner

Directed by Frank Miller

Wiki calls this movie a American superhero noir film, Jackson plays a character called The Octopus and Macht is The Spirit. I have another name for this movie....probably isn’t too polite either. This movie is a 'how to' on 'by the numbers film-making'. Basically this is how you do it: Hire actors who are there for a payday. Make sure you mix in every movie dialogue cliche and you have The Spirit.

Oh and I here by nominate Jackson movie slut of 2008 when this was released. Wiki says this film didn’t do well in general release...NO! Did better in DVD/Blu-ray which I can understand because you can stop it when-ever you want or or go back and find the most atrocious lines and play them over and over again.

I am not even going to try and describe what the plot line is other than maybe Sin City in a food processor. It’s demented, it’s funny by accident, and its Sam Jackson over acting...oh yes,that IS possible.

I wouldn’t even rent it... HULU has it available (that’s where I saw it) and I can’t even rate it, because that would mean I would have to admit it’s a movie.... Oh damn it, there are real actors in it so it deserves some sort of a rating...maybe a 3 and if it had features on the blu-ray describing why they thought it was ok to foist this off on the viewing public might bring the rating up and that might be a reason to rent it........naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

noir it is...I guess. Take the 30s and 40s gumshoe/detective movie and say oh I don’t know make everyone in the film drink a cocktail laced with lsd and crack.

This is my impression. Describe a Sam Spade movie and a Batman movie to someone who has never seen either and while describing them, don’t differentiate between the two. Then have this person write a screen-play.

If you want to read more - check out the wiki article here

2 comments:

JoshM said...

Yeah. Really never had any interest in this one despite (or because of?) my love for Will Eisner's original. Ironically, Eisner had very little interest in super-hero comics and was far more interested in doing small human-interest dramas. So the Spirit himself often became a secondary character in his own comic, while the focus would be on some little, ordinary everyman who might normally be incidental to the typical super-hero story. It was pretty clear to me from the get-go that this movie would completely miss the point.

Beam Me Up said...

JoshM
Boy did you call that one! You know, making the main character secondary to the story line and have as you call it small human-interest dramas... does have it's appeal. Look at the very first episodes of Fantasy Island. I know, the show was an absolute self-indulgent but that was after Ricardo started getting a big head. But initially we were privy to lots of mystery and human drama. It was never quite clear how the mystery man Rourke managed to manipulate events or that he was even involved until the very end when it was clear that he was the master of ceremony. It was that kind of restraint that made the show initially so intriguing. If the movie had shown some restraint, it might have been interesting. The movie glossed over so many things that would have made the Spirit so interesting, instead all we got was a confusing mish mash of self indulgence.