Dispiriting

Frank Miller’s The Spirit is a mugging,
caricatured comic book disaster

WHO IS THAT MASKED HAM? Gabriel Macht

by MARK SLUTSKY

Frank Miller brought a new style to comics when he broke through in the ’80s, taking established characters like Daredevil and Batman (and his own creations, notably the Sin City stories and Daredevil nemesis/love interest Elektra) and severely darkening the tone, creating a super-serious, gritty, noir-inspired aesthetic that, for better or worse, came to dominate the medium.

Starting with the Sin City movie, which he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez, Miller has been bringing his super-macho, super-stylized aesthetic to the big screen. Based on the classic Will Eisner comic of the same name, The Spirit stars Gabriel Macht as the masked crimefighter of the title, who helps the cops nab baddies and continually scraps with his arch-foe, The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson), while his childhood sweetheart (Eva Mendes) goes around stealing stuff.

I was cool with Sin City, at least most of it, but its faux comic book aesthetic, all high-contrast black and white with splashes of colour, with actors playing almost entirely in front of green-screened backgrounds, was a one-shot-deal. I think at this point I can say I categorically hate movies that look like this. They’re decadent, self-indulgent and terrible to look at. If I wanted to read a comic book, I would; the visuals just don’t map onto a movie screen in the same way.

Making it worse is the truly terrible writing, full of lazy throwbacks and far too many winky in-jokes to comics fans. This is somehow made even harder to watch by the acting; Miller seems to have instructed his performers to mug as much as possible, telegraphing every emotion with a caricatured expression. Again, this might work in the comics, but as a filmmaking strategy, it borders on insanity, especially with an actor like Samuel L. Jackson, who doesn’t exactly need encouragement to go big.

The Spirit bears very little resemblance to the innovative and deservedly canonical comic that inspired it. It’s another shot at a type of cinema that has very quickly outworn its welcome. Computer graphics and compositing can work wonders, as in the entirely animated Wall•E or this week’s terrific Waltz With Bashir, but this particular form of hybrid feels static and dead.

THE SPIRIT OPENS THIS
THURSDAY, DEC. 25