Saw The Spirit with Amelia.
- Sin City was my favourite movie of 2005 and I figured this one couldn’t be that far off the mark from where Sin City landed. Oh how wrong I was. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as Sin City, but I didn’t think it would be this spectacularly bad. I don’t know what it is about this one that failed so spectacularly where Sin City succeeded so fantastically, but everything about it falls short or completely misses its mark.
- The noir vibe and dialogue that was deliberately cheesy and dated but scene-setting and wonderful in Sin City just turns into the stuff bad high school drama club productions are made of. If you’re thinking of the dialogue from the play in A Walk To Remember, you are pretty close. “If this is love, pour me another glass?” This is not the stuff epic noir is made of.
- The highly stylized aesthetic is used haphazardly and without focus in The Spirit whereas in Sin City it was used as part of the narrative in addition to being part of the overall look of the film.
- The characters don’t feel like they fit within the world Frank Miller is trying to construct for them and most of the actors aren’t terribly up to the task of doing the kind of work necessary to make them fit in.
- The violence is often pointless and done for entertainment and not because it’s relevant. The movie starts out with The Spirit and The Octopus getting into a fist fight in a tar pit or river or something but we’re given no reason for this other than because they are obviously enemies and rivals. This contextualizes the fight without providing any actual motive and basically sets the stage for how the rest of the movie is going to pan out in terms of stuff that happens because the script dictates it and not because it makes any actual sense.
All in all, it’s a mess.
- Gabriel Macht, who I enjoyed in Because I Said So, was not great as the title character. I can’t decide if it’s him or if it’s all the problems listed above converging against him and making his job difficult. I liked him in a minor role in The Good Shepherd, so who knows. What I do know is that he tried very hard to do a gritty noir voice over but missed his mark because no one does it as well as Mickey Rourke.
- I don’t care for any of the female leads except maybe Sarah Paulson’s character, who I would normally assume is moderately stupid for not realizing that The Spirit is her old flame Denny Colt but I realise that we’re supposed to be operating under ye olde comic book principle that says wearing glasses or an eye mask automatically makes a character unrecognizable to those who know him or her best in their non-hero state.
- Scarlett Johansson was particularly terrible and added nothing to this movie except copious amounts of cleavage. I imagine this is her precise function based on the demographic I assume this movie is aimed at.
- I think perhaps the greatest scene in the movie was when The Spirit was kidnapped by the Octopus, woke up in a dentist’s chair and said “It smells dental in here.” This alone would have been hilarious due to its sheer ridiculousness but then Denny noticed the completely inexplicable and unnecessary Third Reich regalia around the room and said “… dental and Nazi.” You know when something is so spectacularly stupid that you can’t help but fall into a fit of laughter but no one else in the theatre is laughing so you have to suppress your reaction? That happened to me right about that time.
- The other spectacularly hilarious scene was when Samuel L. Jackson destroyed a fluffy white kitten named Muffin and then The Spirit attacked him, saying with every successive punch “That was for Sand Saref (his childhood GF)! That was for me! And that was for MUFFIN!” I can’t make this up.
- I did like how when they exploded The Octopus, the cloud of smoke coming up from the blast had tentacles.