In Which A Spirit Rises And Falls

This Man Killed The Spirit

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Spirit

102 minutes

dir. Frank Miller

There are three things necessary for a movie to be a genuine disaster. First is that it must be tremendously, titanicly misunderstood by critics and casual viewers alike. Second is the inevitable lack of financial success given the film's inappropriately gargantuan budget. And third and usually ignored is that the film must be awful without directly saying so — in other words, it must have some elements of being memorable, but fuck them up so badly as to be irredeemable.

Anything that came from legendary Jewish comic artist Will Eisner has to have some promise on its face. If you have never read The Spirit, don't let the fact that Frank Miller was dropped on his head as a child prevent you from seeking out the comic.

More than anything else, Will Eisner's The Spirit is hilarious. Its foppish hero is cause for guffaws, with a revolutionary bent in how he approaches women and evil and evil women. The Spirit is a comedy, a broad comedy with something for everybody, finding the fun in everything. So it seems all the stranger that the most humorless man in comics would be the one to redo The Spirit.

frank miller is the bane of my existence

Frank, moron that he is, isn't the only culprit. Whoever cast this film should be doomed to spend the rest of their days casting the contemporary update of the classic ABC sitcom, Step by Step. Every single actor in The Spirit is wrong for their respective role, starting with the personality-free lead. Gabriel Macht's career was hopefully ended by this sexless hero jaunt.

Well, surely Johnny Depp or Clive Owen or Jude Law could have gotten at least one laugh from the most ludicrous hero-story ever done in comic book form.

Still, The Spirit doesn't succeed or fail on the basis of its lead; he also needs a full supporting cast. First to go was the borderline racist ways of Spirit's African-American sidekick, Ebony White. That's a forgivable omission given the politically correct times we live in, but somehow along with Ebony's departure goes all the humor and mayhem he brought from the original. I barely understood a word Scarlett Johanssen or Eva Mendes said in the movie, although I did gather that Eva photocopying her ass was supposed to substitute for a major plot twist.

The "story", such as there is one, is that The Spirit's nemesis the Octopus wants to become immortal. Since recapping any more of the plot would likely make my pituary gland explode in Frank's favorite bloody display of gore, I will stop now. No more people need know what happens in this piece of shit than is necessary.

Robert Rodriguez, in between banging leading ladies (Rose MacGowan, Dakota Fanning), co-directed the adaptation of Miller's best ever work in any genre, the adaptation of his comic Sin City, and was able by sheer virtue of his kinetic directorial brilliance to make the film good — so good that Miller would be offered The Spirit, guiding it to a domestic gross of around $17 million. Yikes. We can only hope someone got fired as a result of that decision.

Having deprived The Spirit of his comic foil, Miller has to replace the airtime with something. He gives Octopus a young femme scientist and casts Scarlett Johanssen to play her. Despite her utter lack of acting ability, Scarlett is sometimes useful as eye candy or comic relief, but Miller's script does her no favors. He is clearly in love with her, but like most men he has no idea what, exactly, to do with her.

Given The Spirit's roster of interesting women, it's an incredible feat that Miller reduces them all to boring, fawning stereotypes. He wouldn't know a strong woman if she flashed him in the face. Instead the women of Center City are consigned to lavish black and white backgrounds and vibrant lips, instead of any interesting drama or comedy. This is barely a movie. It is more like a trailer, and it doesn't even do a very good job of encouraging you to watch it.

So Frank Miller made a piece of shit that no one saw, you say. Big deal. What you don't understand is how much there was to make into a movie, how funny and action-packed The Spirit the comic is, and how its characters even within their tiny frames loom larger than life.

There's a flashback to The Spirit's younger days as Denny Colt that gives us a taste of what this movie might have been - the thrill of the unexpected that Sin City gave a glimpse of when it wasn't lovingly photographing Bruce Willis' bald head. Miller shows us The Spirit as a younger man, before he died and came back to life. He's like any other boy, except something great is going to happen to him. The problem is that something never comes.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

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