Variety Reviews "The Spirit" Movie: It Sucks

Image by Strandell via FlickrHere's an excerpt from today's Variety review of "The Spirit" movie by Justin Chang. Let's keep reminding ourselves that this is Frank Miller's Spirit, not Will Eisner's. Any similarity is clearly coincidental, as we all feared:

There's a lot going on here, but none of it sticks -- not theshopworn plotting nor the arch, stilted dialogue. The actors often seemto be delivering their lines in ironic quote marks, suggesting astraight-faced sendup of noir and comicbook conventions that, whateverthe intended effect, falls mostly flat.

The Spirit himselfdoesn't supply much of a rooting interest; Macht's role is colorless inmore ways than one, and we see more of the actor's nicely sculptedtorso than his face (most bigscreen heroes have the decency to take offtheir masks once in a while). Mendes and Lauria come off better,injecting their perfs with sizzle and bite, respectively.

Click here to read the review in its entirety: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117939232.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

And if you're still not convinced it's bad, over at Ain't It Cool News, their reviewer says "The Spirit" movie "replaced Battlefield Earth as the worst movie" he's ever seen.

Read the AICN review here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39450

Can you say "reboot"?

Somehow I don't think this movie is going to sell any more copies of my biography, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life!

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Frank Miller, Don't Read This, Part 8 (AintItCoolNews.com)

Writing in the Will Eisner Listserv on Yahoo! Groups [eisner-l], Tom "The Comics Savant" Stewart points us to a second negative review of the Las Vegas sneak preview of Frank Miller's "Will Eisner's The Spirit" on Ain't It Cool News.com. As of this morning, this review had an astonishing 175 comments:

By "VoicesOffCamera":

I just got back from an advanced screening of “The Spirit” here in Vegas. According to the people hosting the screening, we were the first audience to ever view the film, and that the eventual theatrical release would have some changes.

Now, I’m a fan of the Spirit comics and Frank Miller (Born Again is easily one of my top 5 comics of all-time), so I was intrigued to see if Miller was going to pull this off. If he did this as a comic, I’d expect the modern way over-the-top Miller that we’ve been getting on All-Star Batman, but would that be how he’d portray his friend’s character on the big screen, for people who have never even heard of The Spirit before?

The answer is that the picture he made is closer to the movie “Shoot ‘em Up” than anything Miller or Eisner have done before (That means no “I’m the Goddamn Spirit”).

The violence is very over the top and cartoony in a Looney Toons style. The first fight, for instance, which takes place after an extended version of the “City is my Mother and Lover” roof-jumping scene we’ve all seen in the trailer, consists of Spirit and the Octopus beating the crap out of each other in a pond by pulling all sorts of weapons and blunt objects out of the water and bashing each other with them.

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