Soulless

I am sorry to report that the critics were right: The Spirit is a horrible movie. My dear Scarlett Johansson is still gorgeous, but man this movie sucks. There are several reasons for this (in no particular order):

The acting is bad. Sure, this is Frank Miller’s first directorial effort, but you would think he would have done a better job having co-directed Sin City with Robert Rodriguez. (Now we know Rodriguez deserves all the credit for that movie.) However, that is not the case. Sam Jackson’s performance is so over the top it is ridiculous, and my beloved Scarlett recites her lines looking completely detached, disinterested, and out of it. Maybe she was embarrassed because she knew how awful this film was.

She is not the only one to deliver flat lines, though. The dialogue throughout the whole movie is flat, lifeless, full of clichés and common places. The one-liners fall flat and are cheesy as hell, but not as cheesy as the bad voiceovers or the horrendous, inexplicable chunks of clunky exposition the main character (Gabriel Macht) inflicts upon us. The Spirit will just stand on top of a building and say something like “Octopus, I am coming to get you and put an end to this sorry affair.” And then he’ll jump over to the next rooftop to go find his nemesis. Now that is bad moviemaking.

The plot was trite and unoriginal, and the characters were the opposite of compelling (you knew I was going to use that word sooner or later). I just didn’t care who the Spirit was, what the Octopus knew, and what their motivation was. I didn’t care about the outcome, and couldn’t have cared less about several other things, including revelations, confrontations, and the fate of the different supporting characters. (Fun fact for my Spanish readers: Paz Vega plays a French belly dancer! French!)

Something else I didn’t like was the cinematography. The movie is stylish and somewhat unique-looking, but it shows that Frank Miller is used to drawing comics. What I mean by that is that many, many scenes and frames in the movie look intentionally 2D, as if they had been drawn by Miller, and I don’t think that looks good onscreen. It works on the page, but not so much in a movie.

As for how good an adaptation of the original comic book the movie is, I have no idea. I’ve never read The Spirit, so I can’t judge, but, as a standalone movie, The Spirit is a terrific example of how not to write dialogue, how not to build characters, and how not to tell a story. So I guess it was worth something.