Sin City was amazing. It was funny and dark and horrific and violent and artistic and brutal and stylistic and focused. Robert Rodriguez did an amazing job with Frank Miller’s source material. The same could be said of Zack Snyder’s 300: it was stylistically excellent, looked just like Miller’s graphic novel and knew exactly what it wanted to do, which was to capture the essence of Miller’s source material on camera, show some of the best action sequences ever, and make all men everywhere feel slightly inadequate and join the gym. But, of course, those two films had something in common aside from Frank Miller, in that they were both directed by other people. And so we come to The Spirit, Miller’s directorial debut and an adaptation of Will Eisner’s seminal comic. Would it be as polished and well-executed as Sin City? Would it be as visually arresting as 300? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t wait to find out.

All of the previews got me grinning and salivating like Clinton when presented with an intern. The cast looked amazing. Samuel L. Jackson. Eva Mendes. Scarlet Johansson. He had a sweet cinematographer in Bill Pope (Spiderman 2 & 3, Team America: World Police, The Matrix Trilogy). The plot looked alright too, if a little bizarre in places. Set in a place called Central City, Denny Colt (a noobish cop – Gabriel Macht) returns from the dead to fight crime as The Spirit, now immortal. His nemesis, The Octopus (Sam Jackson), fancies a bit of that immortality too and so goes hunting for a chest containing the Blood of Heracles. There’s a femme fatale named Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) who’s after another with the Treasure of the Argonauts inside. The chests get mixed up in a shootout down at the city’s mudflats and a twisting, turning tale of crime-fighting, love, lust, and betrayal begins. The omens looked good.

 

Yeah, about that…

 

Up until Rodriguez changed the Frankster’s  mind,  Miller had bad things to say about movie adaptations:

People are attempting to bring a superficial reality to superheroes which is rather stupid. They work best as the flamboyant fantasies they are. I mean, these are characters that are broad and big. I don’t need to see sweat patches under Superman’s arms. I want to see him fly.

You get the kind of idea of what Frank wanted to do here in that he didn’t want to take it too seriously; he wanted to have a laugh. The trouble is that Miller, whilst being an excellent advisor – a wonderful visionary that directors can call upon – turns out to know fuck-all about directing himself. The Spirit can’t decide whether it wants to be Sin City 2, a slapstick Adam West-style comedy with an edge or a noir for kids (the 12A and PG-13 ratings confused the hell out of me). It’s nothing like Will Eisner’s original comic, and instead, as I pointed out to my mates upon leaving the cinema, it was basically just 108 minutes of Frank Miller wanking.

Masturbation. Going on a date with Handrea and Palmela. Self-frottage. Pouring a hand shandy. Bashing the bishop.

Polishing the pork sword. Romancing the bone. Whatever you want to call it (any more good ones you guys can think up, post below in the forum), I didn’t pay a fiver to sit through an hour and a half of Frank Miller waltzing with willy. Yeah it looks nice (if pretty much the same as Sin City) but there are no characters here, only cardboard cut-outs. Gabriel Macht isn’t sure whether to be Leslie Nielsen or Christian Bale and looks confused half the time, the women do fuck all except mince around in increasingly less clothing or pout in front of a wind machine, and the plot is more convoluted than a plate of spaghetti trapped inside a 900 square ft. hedge maze designed by the albino dude from Saw. We don’t give a flying fuck about any of it.

 

Only Sam Jackson looks like he’s having any fun. In fact, he very nearly rescues the entire thing by simply accepting the fact that everything around him is more schizophrenic than a disturbed High Times subscriber and overacting everything he does. In fact, his Octopus character probably deserves his own movie. If anything, he’s nothing short of a revelation because we’re so used to him saying ‘Motherfucker’ and shooting things that to see him being, frankly (no pun intended), OTT hilarious is rather excellent. One particular scene sees him in full Nazi regalia taunting his do-gooder nemesis, strapped to a chair by this point, with threats of cutting him into small pieces and mailing them to the ends of the earth. The incongruity of it, the whole WTF nature of it, is very funny.

But it’s not enough to save The Spirit from being….well…..crap. Frank Miller has essentially just fantasised what he’d be like as a superhero (both Miller and the Spirit seem to have the same tailor), surrounded himself with copies of FHM and Playboy and gone to town. If you have to see it, and I really don’t think that you should, at least drink many beers before you do!

 

CGI rating:

 

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