Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

'The Spirit' looks good, but it stinks

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

I often think about what a book or movie would be like if it had been better, but I'm not sure I've ever thought about what one would be like if only it had been worse.

For instance, what would Sin City be like if it had sucked at every possible moment? It turns out it would be exactly like The Spirit. Reverse engineering from here, we can see that if The Matrix sucked, it would have been The Matrix Reloaded, and if Transformers was a steaming pile, it would have been Transformers.

By logical extension, there must be worse versions of us running around, too. In the case of my awful-clone, this means the poor bastard has at most one sock and three-quarters of a shoe, which is going to prove handy when I have to chase him down and make him watch that extra-bad version of College that's out there somewhere.

But on to the garbage du jour. Gabriel Macht (as the Spirit) doesn't know what gave him the powers of strength and vitality he uses to fight crime in Central City. He just knows nemesis Samuel L. Jackson (as the Octopus) has those same powers--and that, as usual, he's up to something hinky.

This time, Macht's long-gone childhood friend Eva Mendes appears mixed up in it, too: she's come in possession of the vase Jackson needs to gain the strength of a god. As Jackson dispatches his minions to retrieve the vase from her, he makes preparations to put Macht down for good.

Recently, comic book movies have been so consistently great it's a surprise when one comes out and it blows instead. Surprise: The Spirit is awful! If the last decade has been a cinematic civil rights movement for comic adaptations, The Spirit takes us back to the dark days of '90s Batman sequels, only this time we'd be right to turn on it with firehoses and deranged letters to the editor.

Its crimes are legion: obnoxious, bad-noir dialogue that makes Spillane sound like Shakespeare. Overacting the likes of which hasn't been seen since the first caveman tried to convince his cave-wife he wasn't cheating with their 18-year-old cave-maid. Artless, exposition-thick storytelling.

Basically, everything writer/director Frank Miller did so well in Sin City has been turned on its ear and then kicked in that ear until its brains spilled out the other side. Some of it's intentional, some of it isn't, and none of it works.

Actually, there's one virtue The Spirit shares with Sin City, and that's that it looks absolutely gorgeous. That and it's loaded with stunningly hot chicks, which I suppose should count for one or, in Mendes' case, two more virtues.

Truthfully, it looks like a living comic book, and cinematographer Bill Pope's shots are so beautiful it's almost enough to make you forget how deeply dumb the rest of the movie is. But you can't have sex with a movie (not since they made the switch to digital), so unlike men, women, and oversized stuffed animals, it's no use if its only quality is looking good.

Unless...no, wait, there is no unless. The Spirit is just terrible. The welcome presence of Jackson and all the eye candy in the world can't stop the stupid words written for their mouths or the annoying ways they've been instructed to deliver them, and however talented Miller might be at constructing plots for graphic novels, he's got a few things to learn about what to do with those pictures once they start moving. Unless you hate yourself, this isn't even the fun kind of bad.

Grade: D+