Reviews thread

[I Am The Knight]

 

[rogue trooper]

Not sure where that comes from. The action was pretty dull and boring in general. It just looked awkward.

Not sure where this comes from.

 

[dft-313]

One thing's for sure - Miller really does have zero sense of humour i seems. All his attempts at it are cringingly bad - even in his best work. It would appear The Spirit has gone the same way.

 

[nightwing06]

Frank Miller's interpretation of Will Eisner's The Spirit is visually stunning and so are the various women in the film.Sometimes the film noir feel works,The Spirit's/Denny Colt's(Gabriel Macht) and Sand Saref's(Eva Mendes) origins are kind of interesting.
That about sums up the best things about The Spirit.It never really gets going,and its to bogged down by campy,silliness,to be taken seriously or for me to become attached to any of the characters.The actors do the best they can with the weak plot/script.Scarlett Johansson as Silken Floss looks and sounds bored.The Octopus's henchman reminded me of the pudgy,brainless specimens The Riddler or Joker would recruit in the 60's campy Batman series.At times the script and delivery of the lines is so grating,i closed my eyes and prayed for certain scenes to end.
I cant even recommend this as a DVD,but when it hits cable give it a glance,while your doing household chores,or surfing the web.
Scale of 1-10 a 3

 

[IDrawDeadPeople]

Not really a review, but here's a heartwarming holiday newsstory about how Frank Miller's failure is, not surprisingly, a failure... in a cheerful blurb entitled...
'The Spirit' Tanks at Box Office

Lionsgate 0 for 2 This Season


"In comparison, Frank Miller’s interpretation of Will Eisner’s classic character met with horrified reviews from those familiar with the source material and poor reviews from everyone else. Even factoring in Christmas Day, the film earned a mere $10,352,000 and is considered the second straight misfire for Lionsgate, which also flopped with Punisher War Zone at the beginning of the month."

Apparently, they didn't consult Manbat or Rogue Trooper, in order to get the only two positive reviews from people who "know the source material".

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/12/28/the-spirit-tanks-at-box-office/



Maybe, the film will do a lot better this weekend... you know... since word of mouth has been so positive about Miller's masterpiece.

 

[theMan-Bat]

Apparently, they didn't consult Manbat or Rogue Trooper, in order to get the only two positive reviews from people who "know the source material".

While many reviews have been negative and the gross for the opening four-days was a disappointing $10.3 million. A significant factor in the film's rather poor box office performance was that its release coincided with strong contenders that largely appealed to general audiences of traditional mainstream genres. The suspense thriller Valkyrie, the romantic drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the family comedy Bedtime Stories, and the relationship comedy Marley & Me, which dominated box office revenues on Christmas. Film critics are polarized as many felt Miller was too obsessed with the visuals and not the storyline, while others acclaimed it as an offbeat avant-garde film. There are many people that do like the film and have given the film positive reviews. It isn't just myself and Rogue Trooper. Here are some that have been previously posted in case you missed them:

Frank Miller's film 'Spirit' goes in with guns blazing

Reviewed by Daniel M. Kimmel
WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE REVIEWER

There's usually some offbeat film on the holiday schedule thrown in as counter-programming. It's usually some second-rate horror movie for viewers who wouldn't be caught dead at any of family movies or serious Oscar bait films that flood theaters this season. This year, though, it's "The Spirit," a stylish adaptation of the classic graphic novel (i.e., comic book) by Will Eisner.

Brought to the screen by Frank Miller, himself a figure of note in the comic book world, it is a crime thriller done in the style of Miller's own "Sin City." In some ways it closes the circle. The more artistic comics artists were influenced by the movies, particularly the film noir genre of the '40s and '50s, which used odd camera angles and dark shadows to create memorably atmospheric films. Miller has now taken those effects adapted for the page and reinterpreted them for the screen.

The story concerns Denny Colt, better known as "The Spirit" (Gabriel Macht), a cop who ought to be dead but who, for reasons he doesn't understand, has been allowed to come back to fight crime in his beloved Central City. Now, like the well-known watch, he can take a licking but keep on ticking. His concern is that his nemesis the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) is on the verge of a breakthrough involving a mysterious urn.

The urn is currently in the possession of Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), who knew Colt when they were kids but then went off in a different direction. This creates problems for the Spirit, who is apparently irresistible to women. He can't help himself from turning on the charm, much to the consternation of his girlfriend Ellen (Sarah Paulson), a police doctor who has to patch him up.

As the story unfolds, it's the visuals that grab you by the throat. It might be something simple like the Spirit mostly in shadow except for his bright red tie. It might be something silly like Louis Lombardi playing all of Octopus' army of clones. Or it might be the allure of Mendes or Scarlett Johansson (as Silken Floss), the film's two femmes fatales.

As with "Sin City," Miller wants you to appreciate the film on several levels. On one level this is a comic book, so when Octopus beats the Spirit with a toilet he laughs, noting that toilets are always funny. On another level it's a visual feast, with every image lovingly framed and lit (and mixed with special effects) so that there's always something interesting to look at. And yet on another level, for those who care to go there, are some interesting characters and themes, as we watch how the different players respond to the failures and wrongs life inevitably hands them.

"The Spirit" turns the idea of "counter-programming" on its head. It's one of the most entertaining movies out this season.

http://208.112.77.53/datebook/movier...time=NOTPASSED

A film review by Chris Barsanti - Copyright © 2008 Filmcritic.com

It's been too long since we've had a proper comic book hero on the screen. There's been enough of them running around and bashing up the bad guys in a CGI-enhanced fashion, that's for sure. But it's hard to look at the recent cinematic incarnations of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne and call them "superheroes;" even if they keep their identities secret and have nifty outfits. "Billionaire action figures" would be more appropriate, what with all their high-priced gadgetry and super-duper hideouts. Whatever happened to the caped heroes who kept an eye on the city's dark alleys and took out the bad guys with nothing more than a sock to the jaw?

Frank Miller's jazzy The Spirit answers that question with a cocky wink and a grin. The streets of Central City are almost always dark and threatening, but they're watched over by a guardian who used to be a cop named Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht, wonderfully deadpan). One near-death experience later and Colt has dug himself out of his own grave. He then decides to serve the city as a masked avenger known as The Spirit, whose only weapons are a ability to absorb ridiculous amounts of punishment and his fists.

There's a supervillain out there called The Octopus (played with rarely-seen operatic relish by Samuel L. Jackson) and a squad of curvaceous femme fatales (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, and Paz Vega, to name just a view of the film's many pouty-lipped vixens) to fall in dangerous love with. The Octopus wants something that will make him invincible, and he's going after an old flame of The Spirit's to get it. So The Spirit leaps into the snowy night, long duster like a cape and blood-red tie flapping in the wind as he bounds across rooftops and intones odes to the object of his affection, the city: "She's my sweetheart, my play thing." And then he gets beat up; a lot. But he always has a quip to spit out the side of his mouth, and a friendly cat who's frequently nearby for him to gripe to.

It's surprising that one of the year's most refreshingly fun films would come from the man who helped Robert Rodriguez create the infinite loop of mind-numbing sadism that was Sin City (tongue-in-cheek or not, after the thirteenth pistol whipping, it got old). This time out, graphic novelist Miller takes the directorial reins himself to adapt that comic-book touchstone, the late Will Eisner's mid-century superhero series. While Eisner's classical storytelling verve and soft-touch humanity would seem an odd fit for Miller -- whose most famous works, like Sin City and The Dark Knight Returns -- are lavished with cynical ultra-violence, the two artists' viewpoints mesh rather beautifully here.

As in Sin City, each frame of The Spirit is more painted than filmed. Miller's performers work inside cartoonish cityscapes that draw equally from his own jagged style and Eisner's Sunday funnies look. It's a frankly gorgeous effect, liberated by the fact that Miller adapted freely from Eisner's panels -- the two were longtime friends -- to create an organic story instead of slavishly following the master's work.

Although The Spirit is in part a classic superhero story, with a square-jawed hero who knows how to take a punch and kiss a dame until she's weak in the knees, it's also a freeform lark that has more fun than anything that has been coming out of the Marvel sausage factory. What with flocks of cloned idiot henchmen (all played by Louis Lombardi) available for easy slapstick, and the Octopus' tendency toward elaborate costumery (one scene has him and his hench-girl in samurai-gear, another in full SS regalia), there's a drift here toward full-on giddy surrealism that beats anything you'll find in the next Incredible Hulk.

In short, it's neat-o.

http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/empor...ews/The-Spirit

The Miami Herald:

The Spirit | Treatment does comics crimefighter justice

BY RICK BENTLEY

The bold visual strokes comic artist Frank Miller used to create Sin City revealed he was the only director who could do justice to the film version of Will Eisner's ground-breaking comic series The Spirit.
Eisner redefined comics in the 1940s and early '50s with his creation of a print version of the film-noir style. His stories were gritty. He used humor like a hidden weapon, exposed only when he needed to make a point.
Miller has shown the same in-your-face skill in the creation of his comics and films. The result of Miller's vision of Eisner's The Spirit is a visual explosion ignited by at times campy acting and melodrama so thick it will hurt your teeth. It's hard not to grimace when one character tells a wounded partner: ``Just shut up and bleed.''
But a traditional presenting of The Spirit would have ended up looking like the lame 1994 Alec Baldwin disaster The Shadow. And going as bleak as The Dark Knight would not have exposed the fanciful aspects of the character.
Only Miller's vision of a world that often exists only in silhouette or shadows is suitable for telling this tale.
The Spirit leaps right into the depths of the comic strip. Viewers are given flashbacks as to how Denny Colt goes from an aw-shucks hero to midnight vigilante. But the look back is only a courtesy glimpse. This film is about the Spirit's (Gabriel Macht) unstoppable attempts to do good as he clashes with the never-ending evil of the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson).
Macht manages to meld macho with melodrama to make the Spirit come to life. It was not an easy job. The character dances so close to lunacy that the edge always seems too close for comfort.
The story moves along with the aid of the intoxicating Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), the complicated Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) and the death-in-waiting Lorelei Rox (Jaime King). These are such strong, tough and alluring characters they can be forgiven for a few moments of total acting insanity. The only one who can't be forgiven is Jackson, whose big onscreen rants have worn thin.
Miller's visual style is like a hallucination. Imagery slips from reality to fantasy in a blink. A mix of old and new costuming and technology gives the movie a timeless feel as it embraces the two-dimensional world of comics and then slides into a complicated tale of love lost. Under Miller's guidance the result is a loyal and loving tribute.

http://www.miamiherald.com/entertain...ry/824526.html


[FONT=Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif]"The Spirit" review. A fun and goofy film that will entertain you if you don’t take it too seriously
12/24/2008 18:57:28 - MovieJungle.com[/FONT]


“The Spirit” is one of those movies that you either accept its silliness and have fun with the concept or reject it outright. It will be one of the goofiest films of the year.

Frank Miller returns to the directorial chair for “The Spirit”. He shared co-directing credit with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for “Sin City”. This time Miller has solo credit as the director for the first time. He employs the same visual style that was used in “Sin City” and “300”. It is one of the few fully digital live-action movies. Most of what you see on the screen is not really there. This style can be invigorating at times or a bit irritating to watch. In “Sin City” it was beautifully rendered and the action came alive. The opposite was true in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. In that film, it just looked fake and unrealistic.

Gabriel Macht is The Spirit, a protector of Central City. He will go to any lengths to protect his city. The Spirit was Denny Colt, a well loved cop who was shot and killed. Colt was brought back to life and given powers of healing. Mere bullets cannot stop him. Every woman seems transfixed by his bravery and style.

The archenemy of The Spirit is The Octopus (Samuel Jackson). The Octopus seems to have the same type of power as The Spirit. Jackson has hammed it up for a role before. This time he truly goes all out in the hamming up department. In more serious films, this would be a serious liability and distraction. In “The Spirit”, it is par for the course and even appropriate. The Octopus’s zeal for power is only matched for his disdain for people seeing him and his loathing of eggs.

The Octopus is joined in his quest by his assistant Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson). Johansson seems to be having a ball in this role. In some roles she has seemed stiff, but here she is unburdened by not having to play a dramatic role. It is amusing to see all the different outfits that she displays to fit any particular scene.

The Octopus has routine encounters with The Spirit. They almost have a love/hate relationship. The Octopus seems bored by the cops of Capital City and comes alive when dealing with The Spirit. In one such encounter, The Octopus gets a valuable chest filled with a shiny object. Unfortunately for the Octopus, he truly wanted the other chest that had the blood of Hercules in it. The blood would give him unlimited power and immortality. The blood however has dire effects for mere mortals.

The person who holds the other chest is Sands Seref (Eva Mendes). She was an old flame of Denny's when they were younger. After tragedy strikes, she turned to a life of crime. Just like Johansson, Mendes has fun with this character. Seref has married several times and is attracted to anything shiny. She states to a man that double crossed her that he made an ass of himself. Seref gets this point across by xeroxing her ass and handing him the copy. After nearly dying, The Spirit demands that someone bring him a red tie that always compliments his outfit. That is the kind of film this is. If you can picture that these two scenes are funny, you will have a good time watching this flick.

“The Spirit” is a fun and goofy film that will entertain you if you don’t take it too seriously. There are visual treats to be had and great one liners you can chuckle at.

[FONT=Tahoma, Arial, Verdana]About : Eric Sloss
Eric Sloss, Writer, MovieJungle.com
You can contact Eric Sloss at [email protected][/FONT]

http://www.moviejungle.com/headlines...=1201&zoneid=1



THE KANSAS CITY STAR:

By JASON HECK

Writer-director Frank Miller had a huge role in moving comics from geek-lit to high art with his seminal graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. His feature debut doesn’t prove such a cinematic watershed, but the style dazzles, evoking everything wonderful and terrible from film noir and combining it with a likable hero and wonderfully pulpy premise.
Denny Colt (boyishly charming Gabriel Macht) is a rookie cop gunned down in the line of duty. Through mysterious circumstances he doesn’t understand, he’s resurrected. He shrugs off blows that would lay low the mightiest palooka, and machetes and bullets merely irritate him and slow him down.
He dons a mask and strikes a deal with Police Commissioner Dolan (gruff and perfect Dan Lauria) to go where Dolan’s officers cannot, to wage a new kind of war on the criminals of Central City, a filth-streaked urban hellhole.
Every hero needs a nemesis, and the Spirit has a humdinger in the form of the Octopus. As inhabited by Samuel L. Jackson, he is a former city coroner looking for the secret of immortality, prone to violent outbursts and Cheshire Cat smiles, and assisted by Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), one of several femmes fatale shoehorned into the plot.
Miller has seen two of his works, “Sin City” and “300,” adapted into hugely successful films. Their directors, Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder, established a certain visual style in comic book films, and Miller doesn’t deviate from it in any great measure.
Central City, towering gray monoliths wreathed in snow, isn’t too far from Basin City of “Sin City.” It’s a city where the police are overmatched and people hide behind curtains rather than aid a passerby calling for help. Miller’s joy at pairing his astonishing visual sense with a worthy budget is evident in many of his compositions, which are stark and often iconic.
The same attention is on display in every scene. But given the Spirit’s Sunday-comics origins and the pulp-turgid nature of the plot, it’s welcome.
The dark, hopeless scenery is fortunately leavened with some sharp dialogue, with the Spirit and his various female foils cracking wise in small exchanges that wouldn’t be out of place in a Howard Hawks screwball comedy. Miller does tend to keep the reins a bit too slack on Jackson, however, and allows him to indulge in his unfortunate tendency to scream his dialogue.
But “The Spirit” is terrific entertainment. It’s a better and a more complete film than “Sin City” or “300.” Having a comic book genius create a comic book movie is a very, very good idea indeed.

http://www.kansascity.com/710/story/948747.html

 

[theMan-Bat]

Here's another positive review that's brand spankin' new:

Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)
Ken Hanke | 12/31/2008
Genre: Damn Weird Comic-Book Movie
Directed by: Frank Miller (Sin City)
Starring: Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Paulson, Dan Lauria

Upfront, I have never in my life read a Spirit comic book or comic strip. All I know about Will Eisner’s classic 1940 creation The Spirit I learned from reading about it, or I gleaned information from friends whose interest in comics and the history of them is greater than mine. Therefore, I’m not the person to come to as concerns the faithfulness of Frank Miller’s film incarnation of The Spirit. Still, I can’t help but conclude that there’s at least a hint of fealty to Eisner’s creation, on which Eisner said he quickly added a small mask so he could tell his backers that, yes, The Spirit had a costume. Plus, the film’s peculiar story line seems in keeping with some of the loopier plot outlines of Eisner’s faux-noir originals. And I’m told that The Octopus’ (Samuel L. Jackson) repeated phrase, “That’s just damn weird,” is authentic. It’s also a phrase that accurately describes the whole movie.
I’m a little surprised by the scorn and derision that’s been heaped on Miller’s film by both fans and critics. I’ve read many of the criticisms, and while I don’t want to say that those attacking the film don’t “get it,” I do have to note that many—maybe most—of the very things they’re railing against are precisely the elements that I found amusing and entertaining about The Spirit. It’s possible I’m somehow more in tune with Miller’s mind-set here than they are. It’s also possible that they do indeed “get it,” but they don’t want it. Perhaps they don’t want it for the simple reason that The Spirit is a film that takes the piss out of the comic-book-movie genre. As such, it’s out of joint with the mood of the moment—the moment when The Dark Knight is being seen as the full maturation of the comic-book film. The first post-post-modern comic-book movie could not have arrived at a worse time.
The Spirit is a loopy affair—make no mistake. It makes sport of both comic books and hard-boiled detective fiction, yet it does so by utilizing and adhering to the conventions of each. If you’re willing to go with this approach, you’re likely to have fun with the film, which is a lot shrewder and more cleverly developed than its detractors are willing to admit. There are elements of Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005) here, and also the 1967 Casino Royale—not to mention the kind of scrambled period setting one finds in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990). The story is not in the least incoherent—though it’s been called that. In fact, it’s pretty straightforward in terms of plot.
You have a hero, The Spirit/Denny Colt (a surprisingly appealing Gabriel Macht), cut from the Raymond Chandler cloth of Philip Marlowe, meaning that he’s constantly narrating the film (and sometimes just plain talking to himself) in faux Marlovian terms. The difference is that he seems to be unable to be killed, no matter how much punishment is doled out to him. In typical film-noir manner, he doesn’t himself know why. You have a super-genius villain, The Octopus, who shares this invulnerable trait, but does know why, and likes nothing better than spending hours shooting, stabbing, bludgeoning and otherwise evidencing antisocial behavior against The Spirit.
There’s a femme fatale, Sand Seref (Eva Mendes), who just happens to be The Spirit’s childhood sweetheart gone bad. Of course, they’ve never really gotten over each other. And there’s “good girl” Ellen Dolan (TV actress Sarah Paulson), a doctor who spends a good deal of her time patching up The Spirit, and is, of course, hopelessly in love with him (even while not realizing he’s her supposedly dead boyfriend, Denny Colt). But then The Spirit is catnip to all the ladies—some of whom, like Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega, Talk to Her), harbor grudges. Next, there’s the amiably amoral Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), who functions as The Octopus’ girl Friday. And finally, throw in an endless supply of mentally defective dispensable clone henchman (all played by Louis Lombardi) who The Octopus insists on naming by labeling their shirts. (We start out with names like “Pathos” and “Logos,” but they degenerate to “Huevos” and “Rancheros” by the end.)
The plot involves The Octopus’ search to get his mitts on a container of Heracles’ (Hercules, to most folks) blood that will turn him into a god ("or the next best thing,” as Silken Floss insists on reminding him). The crate containing this gets mixed up with the one containing the object of Sand Seref’s obsession, the Golden Fleece ("There’s something creepy about it,” opines The Octopus). Call the plot functionally silly, but it is functional. The film may not move smoothly—Miller’s too fond of “just damn weird” digressions for that—but it does move and isn’t hard to follow.
Its screwiness is deliberate and it’s all a matter of taste. If you don’t respond positively to a hero who awakens tied to a dentist’s chair muttering, “Something smells dental,” then looks around to find he’s in a Swastika-festooned Nazi playroom before adding in distaste and horror, “Dental and Nazis,” this probably isn’t for you. If Samuel L. Jackson dressed in a Nazi uniform speechifying to a recording of “Deutschland Über Alles” holds no strange amusement for you, avoid The Spirit at all costs. On the other hand, if such appeals to you, has Frank Miller got a movie for you!

http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/spirit

 

[TheVileOne]

These reviews don't really change the fact that the movie is a bomb and an embarrassment to cinema.

 

[IDrawDeadPeople]

These reviews don't really change the fact that the movie is a bomb and an embarrassment to cinema.

Exactly. 3 or 4 "nice" reviews out of thousands of "Miller is an idiot and made a terribly amateurish film" reviews doesn't change the fact that Miller made an @$$ out of himself and Eisner's characters with this failing, unlikable piece of crap, and the vast majority of humanity who has come into contact with it has had the decency to warn their fellow humans not to go near it.

 

[theMan-Bat]

These reviews don't really change the fact that the movie is a bomb

True, it is a box-office financial failure. That is a fact.

and an embarrassment to cinema.

That's an opinion.