The Spirit

When I saw the first trailer for this movie, I was excited and looking forward to seeing it in the theater. The next trailer had me much less interested and planning on waiting for the DVD release. I never did see it, but The Younger Son picked it up today so we watched it tonight. The Spirit is a 2008 Frank Miller adaptation of a comic series. I am totally unfamiliar with the comic. Samuel Jackson (whom I just saw in Sphere) is in this one. His name keeps turning up in political circles, as in, "Obama needs to quit channeling Morgan Freeman and become Samuel Jackson!" The film was a bit of a let down, and I wasn't expecting to be wowed. There just didn't seem to be much to it.

trailer:


Moria says,

The more one watches of The Spirit the more it starts to seem like Frank Miller has taken the visually arresting look he employed on Sin City ... only to conduct a remake of something like tv’s Batman (1966-8), which took all the heroic epithets and rendered the dialogue in an over-the-top parody of purple prose.... There’s an appealingly offbeat goofiness to it all... most audiences failed to understand The Spirit and it ended up being a big box-office flop.... One predicts though that in a few years time from now The Spirit is going to be rediscovered as a cult classic.

Stop Tokyo opens with this: "The Spirit moved me. To tears. Of boredom." /film calls it "worse than expected." Roger Ebert gave it one puny star and calls it "mannered to the point of madness," saying "There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material." The New York Times says, "What is most striking about “The Spirit” is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to be sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once." Variety says, "Frank Miller's solo writing-directing debut plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air. Pushing well past the point of self-parody..."