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The Spirit

The name isn’t as familiar to the general public as Superman or Spider-Man or Batman, but comic book fans consider the Spirit one of the seminal figures in the genre. He debuted in 1940, the creation of Will Eisner, as a noir prototype, an avenging figure stalking the nighttime streets of a aging city. The Spirit differed from other comic heroes of the time in that he had no powers other than a mysterious resistance to punishment (he is a murdered cop returned to life). He was also a blatant womanizer, and the stories contained a strong dose of humor.

The humor seems to be the aspect that Frank Miller was most interested in when adapting the Spirit into a movie. Miller of course is the comic book deity who dug into the dark soul of Batman with stories like The Dark Knight, and whose 300 was adapted into a monster hit last year. Miller got into filmmaking when Robert Rodriguez took him on as a co-director of Sin City, based on Miller’s grim series of graphic novels.

It’s no surprise that The Spirit looks not unlike Sin City, consisting largely of actors against darkly stylized green screen backdrops. But it’s not nearly as dark (it’s rated PG-13); in fact, it’s surprisingly silly. The hero is played by the fairly unknown Gabriel Macht, who looks and acts a lot like a younger Bruce Campbell, and in fact The Spirit plays like an early Sam Raimi movie. Samuel L. Jackson has a great time hamming it up as The Octopus, our hero’s nemesis as well as the link to his post-death existence. There are femmes fatale played by Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes (though the joke behind naming her after a typeface escapes me). The movie is stolen by doughy Louis Lombardi as an endless parade of cloned henchmen, each one dumber than the last. (A running joke involves their names, which start with Pathos, Ethos, and Logos before descending into Dailos, Dildos, Huevos, and Rancheros, though never all the way down to Msdos.) It’s nice to look at, but the silliness very quickly becomes a slick surface that everything else slides off of.

m. faust



Watch the movie trailer for The Spirit


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