Spiritus Mundane

The Spirit starring Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johannsen and Eva Mendes, directed by Frank Miller (2008): With adaptations of Miller's comics 300 and Sin City having scored high on the Hollywood coolness factor (though personally I find 300 boring and not a little detestable), it was probably inevitable that he'd get to direct a film himself, especially as he was listed as co-director on Sin City.

Why the powers that be decided to have him co-write and direct an adaptation of Will Eisner's beloved and seminal Spirit series from the 1940's is a good question. Miller interviewed Eisner for Eisner/Miller (a nod to Hitchcock/Truffaut), and has been compared to Eisner throughout his career. This movie, though...whew, what a mess. An enjoyable mess, but a mess nonetheless.

The original Spirit series is justifiably famous for the way it pushed the early boundaries of 'how' comic books worked both structurally and narratively. In a lot of Spirit stories, the eponymous hero -- a cop left for dead who's returned as a hero -- is secondary to a short story about another character. In others, the Spirit is essentially second-banana to some boundary-pushing on the graphics front, perhaps no better epitomized than in the increasingly complicated splash pages in which the Spirit's name would be worked into some complicated representation of the story one was about to read.

The Spirit was also fairly tongue-in-cheek about heroics and super-heroics -- the Spirit's only 'power' was his ability to take a beating. The Eisner Studios surrounded its hero with a variety of femme fatales with suggestive or even simply comic names (Sand Saref and Plaster of Paris both show up in the movie), rendered in full 40's vavavoomity.

Basically, if you want an idea of what made The Spirit special, pick up DC's The Best of the Spirit. It'll run you less than $20, and it's a darned good volume. But the movie...

First off, the unknown Gabriel Macht -- who plays The Spirit -- isn't to blame for this mess. I actually thought he did a pretty good job with the messily characterized hero that was written for him, a hero whose portrayal jumps all over the map, from campy to straight to satire to, well, I don't know what. It's a godawful mess of writing, as if Miller couldn't decide whether he loved the material or hated everything about it and comic books in general, a sourness that's certainly been there in Miller's comics work for a couple of decades now.

The movie looks great at points. The femmes fatale look great. The narrative is silly and jumbled. Samuel Jackson is a nightmare of tics and yelling as super-criminal The Octopus, a character we never actually saw (except for a cigarette) in the Spirit series, and which we see way too much of here. There's some gratuitous Nazi stuff that makes no sense. And the whole thing has been lifted out of its era and plunked down into one of those anomalous movie landscapes in which cellphones and massive helicopters exist side-by-side with 40's clothing, hairstyles and faux-40's-noir dialogue.

All in all, a mess. Enjoyable at points, but a mess.