The Spirit

I have learned that it is no longer cool to call things "a hot mess." Which is fine. Because The Spirit is not a hot mess. "Hot mess" implies a sort of seething, manic craziness. No, The Spirit is very much a cool mess.

As you may know, I love me a hot mess at the theater. I have a masochistic leaning toward filmmakers who go flying off the handle aesthetically, even if it means the actual films are dangerously unbalanced and explode on contact with the screen. But The Spirit doesn’t so much explode as melt slowly, slowly down.

But first, some plot stuff. The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is a two-fisted, secretly-back-from-the-dead, un-killable crime fighter who looks out for the citizens of Central City while hopping across rooftops in his trademark fedora, black mask, and red tie. His archnemesis is the Octopus, played to almost unbearable levels of archness by Sam The Man Jackson.

When he’s not swinging from fire escapes and pummeling ne’er-do-wells into submission, The Spirit is smoothing the ladies. The film boasts a pin-up magazine-worth of va-va-voom female forms, including those of Eva Mendes (as Sand Saref, The Spirit’s childhood gal-pal), Scarlett Johansson (as Silken Floss, the Octopus’s sexy-librarian administrative assistant), Sarah Paulson (as The Spirit’s pre-death squeeze), Paz Vega (as Plaster of Paris, a knife-wielding belly dancer), and Jaime King (as... heck, I have no idea--some sort of underworld siren who appears in visions). The names alone should give you an idea of where The Spirit is headed tonally.

The McGuffin supposedly driving the film’s plot is a vase (or rather, VAHz) containing the blood of Heracles, which when drank will give you immortality or godlike powers or maybe the ability to choose better film projects.

But the true power behind The Spirit is the visual style and hard-boiled excesses of director Frank Miller. Non-comic-book fans will have to bear with us for a bit while we fill in The Spirit’s pedigree. The Spirit newspaper strip was created in 1940 by Will Eisner, so it comes by its noir trappings naturally. Eisner is revered in the comic-book, or rather the “sequential art” community—the annual comics awards are called the Eisners. Eisner did so much to revolutionize the way comics look, the way they convey visual information and narrative flow, that looking at his Spirit strips today can be a bit of a letdown. So much of what he did that was new and groundbreaking then is simply taken for granted today.

These days Frank Miller is probably best known as the comic book writer-artist who created Sin City and 300. But 23 years ago, Miller (alongside Alan Moore, writer of The Watchmen) helped re-revolutionize the superhero genre with The Dark Knight Returns, his gritty re-imagining of The Batman. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films owe more than a little to Miller’s noir-ish vision of the Caped Crusader.

But in the ‘90s, Miller dove even deeper into the hard-boiled crime genre, while also boiling his artwork down to stark, silhouetted abstracts. Like the author James Ellroy did as he moved through his LA Quartet novels, Miller has continued to pare down his style until it becomes almost incomprehensible. Miller's writing also became so mannered that it was often hard to tell if it was homage, parody, or self-parody--the line between cliche and irony vanished. As a result, most comic book readers have a love-loathe thing going with Frank Miller.

That same visual and verbal sensibility--and love-hate dichotomy--has followed Miller to his directorial debut. (He co-directed the film version of Sin City alongside Robert Rodriguez, though there are conflicting reports as to how much Miller did or did not actually direct Sin City.) The Spirit is stuffed full-to-bursting with silly tough-guy patois, dazzling imagery, and, of course plenty of oogling of its pantheon of females.

In fact, if approached with the right expectations (low and laid-back) and the right tolerance for noir-baked cheese (high), The Spirit can be fun, thanks to Miller’s dedication to his over-the-top, clenched-jaw style. (Though be warned: Miller has fetishized the joy of violence to Heraculean—or rather, Wile E. Coyote—extremes. If you can’t laugh at someone getting brained with an entire toilet, then there’s no way you’ll handle a fluffy kitty later being melted down into goo.)

The problem is that Miller simply doesn’t know how to direct and pace a feature film. The Spirit is about 40 minutes of plot, punchouts and charm drawn out over 110 minutes of film. No matter what sort of snap and sizzle fills a scene, the scene itself spins its wheels three times longer than it should. All this filler and padding as Miller lingers lovingly over his sharp, striking visuals makes The Spirit’s stylistic excesses quickly wear out their welcome. For as much effort as is poured into its looks, The Spirit is numbingly devoid of energy.

You can’t blame the cast. Despite a drumming from critics and fanboys, I found Gabriel Macht to be a deadpan delight as The Spirit. He has a Brendan Fraser cartoon glare that works well here, though Macht would have been better served if he’d been allowed to loosen up more often--his voice-over paens to his beloved City are much more pretentious than poetic.

And here’s a surprise: Sam “I have had it with these gosh darn snakes on this gosh darn plane!!” Jackson takes a comic book role and goes way, way past the boundaries of reason with it. To complain about Jackson’s devouring of the digital scenery is like complaining that your cheeseburger is greasy. By the time he shows up monologuing in full Nazi regalia, you’ll either have given in or be on the way out the door.

Of the actresses, Eva Mendes comes off best, slinking into her role as a jewel thief with a heart (and purse) full of gold as if she were born in it. On the other hand, Scarlett Johansson never seems comfortable—unable to get her pursed lips around the hardboiled dialogue, she can’t quite find the material’s pulp rhythms.

All of this plays out against the sort of digital retro-scapes that made Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow such a joy to gawk at. Unfortunately, The Spirit’s narrative failings also equal Sky Captain’s. Miller has grand visual and stylistic intentions but no skill at all for using them to tell a story. Admirably pushing ahead on his vision, sweeping Eisner’s original charms up in his own artistic ego, Miller leaves his audience far behind. It takes an iron constitution indeed to hang in with The Spirit all the way to the credits.

The tragedy of The Spirit is that it would have been a revelation, hailed as an overlooked delight, if it had been a small-budget film sneaking in the back door. But its presence as a Big Holiday Release doomed it to being skewered on both box-office expectations and Miller’s own delusions of cinematic grandeur.