'SPIRIT' IS COMIC

Miller Pic Falters, Flails in Muted Duotone

Splotchy colors and swooping camera make for a few worthy frames, but “The Spirit” is plenty of art short of becoming spiritual. Helmer/scribe Frank Miller drags the dated Will Eisner comic of the same name through several layers of a cinematic hell before finally allowing it to expire. As Death insinuates to the title character in the opening frames, any moment would be a good time to give up the ghost. B.O. will be light, as auds flock to less convoluted fair.

The title character is played by thesp Gabriel Macht. He elides any emotional density in the film with an endless and entirely ineffectual voiced-over monologue/narration/autobiography, occasionally breaking the fourth wall. Samuel L. Jackson overacts his cookie-cutter supervillian to an award-worthy summit of self-indulgence, in one scene, wearing not one, but two katanas. Eva Mendes, hoisting the most throughly padded bra she's been in, since, well, “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” delivers her lines with a near-complacent emotional disarray and boredom. Dan Lauria proffers up a foul-mouthed police commissioner, literally capable of gathering no audience sympathy. Scarlett Johansson, blonde again and apparently unable to pay bills with returns from Woody Allen's output, bounces around in “Spirit” to occasionally offer such lines as one intimating that profits are down “twenty percent across the board.” (An accurate guess, going off of “Sin City,” I suppose.) And the implausibly attractive Paz Vega and a bevy of other flawless femmes flesh out the remainder of the playbill.

The problems with “Spirit” are probably too numerous to make workable material for a master's thesis in film studies, so I will try to cover the passable aspects and give a prompter review. The cinematography, lensed by reliable actioner Bill Pope, attempts to imitate the jagged and piecewise frames of a comic book. It somewhat succeeds, although the resultant effect was mostly not to my liking, and felt stilted at worst and oddly plain otherwise. The visual style is detectably Frank Miller: the saturated blue eyes and red lips, the pale outer world, the two-toned contrast, and the interspersed rotoscoping. But it fails to even match the artistry of his previous work. Missing are the fluid jumps from normal motion to delicate choreography of overcranked footage, the weightless streams of consciousness, and the stark colorful contrasts that made “300” such an escape.

The rest of the film is not laudable under any system of cinematic appreciation. The plot, incomprehensible, was clearly understood by the filmmakers even less than any prospective audience. The film is set in no particular time period (the question is lackadaisically dodged when posed) but, as such, somehow left me covered in the overwhelming scent of anachronism: the cell phones, the mini-nukes, and the Aquafina water bottle. And the dialog I would compare to randomized strings of words, with the caveat that random strings of words, such as “MONKEY HOUSE IT,” would occasionally make some whit of sense.

At some point during this screening, I thought I was enjoying the film. I love overacting – I'll watch lousy (and I mean lousy) made-for-TV movies, just to sample the billows of spittle loosed as the D-list thesps masticate their lines. And suffice it to say, “Spirit” serves up some overacting. Plumed in full Nazi regalia, the Jackson character divulges his evil plans. He rails against chickens, for the sake of avoiding their dirty brown eggs. He then places a kitten – a baby cat, just to be clear – into a sink and cackles as the feline dissolves, accompanied by brassy Teutonic melodies. All this, just before the exotic dancer/butcher moves in to chop up the title character. And while I enjoyed some part of that, the novelty eventually wore thin. And so during the credits, at about the 2nd 2nd AD, I abdicated my normal rule of staying through the end of the roll, and left the theater.

I really needed this film to tide me over until “Watchmen.” I was patently ignoring the advance critical reception, in hopes of enjoying the picture on a cold viewing. To double check my reaction, I examined the critical response after my screening. As StudioBriefing would say, “notices were bad.”