Lew Irwin
The Spirit, based on the Will Eisner comic book, has got into the spirit of the season by allowing critics to burst forth in all their bah-humbug glory. Consider how much Roger Ebert must have reveled in writing his opening paragraph in the Chicago Sun-Times. "The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material. The movie is all style -- style without substance, style whirling in a senseless void." Here are a few other descriptions of the movie: Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: "Hard boiled and half-baked;" Jason Anderson, the Toronto Star: "a desperate, offensive and thoroughly misguided travesty;" Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News: "one of the worst movies of the year." And then there's A.O. Scott's take on the movie: "What is most striking about The Spirit," he writes, "is how little pleasure it affords." Finally, Carina Chocano, who was recently let go by the Los Angeles Times, turns up as a reviewer for the Washington Post. Her conclusion: "Good comic books suggest action through abstraction, but The Spirit plays like an overproduced diorama. Watching it is like watching three dimensions trying to pass themselves off as two."
Reviewed by: quintusIX on 5/16/2009 4:34:57 PM
owen, madsen, alba, rourke, hauer, wood, and, of course, willis, are all absent from spirit, although one or two previous cast members reprise, either because they had the sense to recognize a badly disconnected script or because it was done on the cheap..... the spirited but basically incomprehensible spirit is lead by no-name gabriel macht (nothing personal, gabriel), who narrates in the same ominous, gutteral whisper as clive owen before him, but has no chance of keeping up with sam jackson, who in turn has no chance of keeping up with the limp, and sometimes overtly bad dialogue he must declaim (his persona being left utterly unexplained, as are other central elements of the film, such the fact that macht is eternally horny, and jackson scenes at one point in nazi drag)....even more vapid than 300 (which is saying something), although just as seductive visually...this eternally benighted and snow laden work, to steal a line from the movie, comes off more as a work in progress....think sin city II minus I I/II....ciao.
