Hey yo. Time for more Working Title stuff. This came up in the FAN forums recently, in a discussion of the worst superhero movies of all time. I mentioned the idea of reviewing this movie to Dan Lashley last week, and he “popped”, as you’d say in the rasslin’ business. So it’s a no-brainer.
Only doing one movie this week, since watching this abomination again has filled me with so much rage that I couldn’t stomach the idea of shaming any other film by including it in the same goddamn column with this piece of shit. Yes, I know, I’m only providing half the content this week and I’m very sorry. Well, kinda sorry. Okay, not even remotely sorry at all. You try watching this abomination, and see if you feel like ever sitting down for another movie again! So, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you one of the worst fucking movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
The Spirit (2008, directed by Frank Miller): 0/10
If you pay money for this, I will personally come to your house and kick your ass.
Well this is pretty much the worst comic book adaptation I’ve ever seen. Writer/director Frank Miller commits total franchise assassination with this unbelievably awful movie, a chunk of howling batshit insanity which just defies all description. It’s hard for a movie to be so bad that it actually makes me angry, but congratulations, this one did it. Yeah, it’s worse than Batman & Robin, worse than Superman IV, worse than Ghost Rider, worse than Catwoman, worse than X3: X-Men United, worse than Elektra, worse than whichever your least-favorite The Crow sequel was, worse than any other comic-spawned abomination that you could possibly name. The only real competition it has is among the really bad low-budget films, stuff like Roger Corman’s infamously never-released version of Fantastic Four or those awful Captain America made-for-television movies back in the 70s. But those are a different kettle of fish entirely from a big Hollywood production like The Spirit, with an eight-figure budget, a roster full of recognizable stars, and a relatively respectable comic book writer in charge of the whole thing.
Will Eisner’s original Spirit comics aren’t well known among casual fans. I doubt if there’s enough people on this site who’ve read them for me to count on two hands. To anyone willing to read comics older than your parents, I can’t recommend Eisner’s work enough. They’re not even superhero stories half the time; in many of the best Spirit comics, the Spirit himself is barely even in the thing. The stories are more about the background characters, the odd little people in the margins of the tale who usually never get a story all to themselves. Once you get used to the old-fashioned style of artwork and dialogue, you won’t find a better comics from that time. (Well, the later stuff anyway. His first couple of years were awfully rough and amateurish, along with a taint of racism which was common at the time and thankfully got dropped as the book progressed.) Sadly, they’re obscure enough now that most people have barely even heard of them, despite the Eisner Awards being the most prestigious prize given in the comics industry.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present: the murder victim.
But the damnable part is I KNOW Frank Miller has read them. He goes so far as to insert individual out-of-context quotes of random dialogue in his movie from various issues of Eisner’s comics. Yet Miller, a guy who knows better, murdered those original concepts and props them up like Bernie on the weekend and puts on a puppet show. At their best, Eisner’s comics were practically a satire of how ridiculous the crime-fighting pulp heroes of the 40s were; the finest stories often barely had the Spirit himself in them at all, focusing more on the human bystanders surrounding the tale.
So naturally, adapting that kind of thing into a garish CGI action flick which combines the worst parts of Adam West Batman with Joel Shumacher Batman while totally ripping off the stylized look of Sin City should be the very first thing that would come to any sane person’s mind, right? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with Frank Miller. I’m a fan of the guy; yes, I even liked Dark Knight Strikes Back and All-Star Goddamn Batman. But here he goes so far off the rails that he should never, ever be allowed to handle any existing properties ever again.
Even just looking at the screencaps, you can tell that the actors should all be ashamed of themselves.
The Spirit (Gabriel Macht, no I’d never heard of him either before this movie) is kind of a Batman-meets-the-Shadow crimefighter in Central City, an obvious stand-in for NYC. He does a lot of really shitty hard-boiled narration, fights with his arch-nemesis The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson, and ho boy we’ll come back to him), and is inexplicably followed by cats everywhere he goes. He also finds time to romance a shitload of women (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Jaime King, Paz Vega, Sarah Paulson, Stana Katic, and many more) in a manner which even James Bond would find unrealistic. The sexual objectification of every single female character in the entire movie crosses the line between “loving tribute to goofy old noir comics” and into “jesus christ, Frank, what is your problem with women?” There’s some kind of plot about secret formulas and conspiracies and hunting for mystical doodads, but it’s all explained so poorly and so incoherently that none of it makes the slightest bit of fucking sense.
Frank Miller: feminist icon! Seriously, these are his idea of "perfect women".
This movie is a clinic of horrible acting. Every single one of these actors seem to think they’re all in different movies, and all of them go for totally different tones. Some try for straight-faced camp, others play for sincere emotion, some are dryly observing the wacky shit around them, and some seem to have no idea what the hell they’re doing there. It all mixes together into an unappealling mess which makes you feel like none of these people have ever acted in a movie before, and none of them ever need to do so again.
And then there’s Sam Jackson. This is the single most over-the-top performance he’s ever given. Yes, really. Without question or competition. He’s screaming, howling, mugging, flailing, acting like Jim Carrey on PCP while reciting the worst dialogue imaginable. He hams it up like Nicolas Cage could only dream of doing. Which is even worse if you know that in the original books, the Octopus was a shadowy mastermind who was so far removed from the action that we never even saw his face. Basically, he was Doctor Claw, or Professor Moriarty, the guy who was so powerful and so secretive that the hero could never even get near him. In the movie, we get Jackson stomping around in a Nazi uniform and hitting the Spirit over the head with toilets and obsessively talking about eggs all the time. Yes. Seriously. Fucking Nazi uniform. No, he’s not a real Nazi, he just likes the outfit or something. Not making that up. Check the picture below.
I have not altered this image in any way.
I mentioned that the visual style is blatantly stolen from Sin City; I don’t know if that’s fair or not considering that Miller wrote that comic, but this movie is still trying way too hard to copy the look of that one, at times practically shot-for-shot. It fails in the attempt, too, often looking more like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In terms of simple storytelling, the movie is an appalling disaster. It’s incoherent, confusing, the comedy is not funny, the action is not thrilling, and the drama is so terribly bad that it actually pissed me off when the movie seemed to expect me to care about these cardboard characters. And worst of all for a fan of the old comics, it takes a bunch of great old stuff and mutilates it into the worst new stuff you’ve ever seen. I’m amazed that this guy, the same asshole who wrote Robocop 3, actually found a way to make an even worse movie. Fuck Frank Miller for this worthless film, which takes a contemptuous steaming piss on Will Eisner’s grave.
This is the face of the perpetrator. Find him. Stop him. By any means necessary. His reign of terror must end.
(pant, pant, pant)
Okay, I’m done. I’m out. I got nothing left. See you next week, hopefullywith some much better movies.