The Spirit

[Krug]

Frank Miller tries to put Eisner's creation in Sin City, and the result is a mess. And Samuel Jackson's scenery-chewing spiel is getting kinda tiring.

Only bright spark was Eva Mendes who really hammed it up.

 

[Relique du Madde]

It was that bad?

 

[RangerWickett]

See, I don't have high expectations for these movies. I rate them on a second tier scale of bad superhero movies, some of which can still be entertaining.

Movies like:

Elektra
Daredevil
Fantastic Four
Hancock
Ghost Rider
Spider-Man 3
X-Men 3
Batman Forever
Batman and Robin


Elektra is clearly the worst, but it's pretty hard to rate any as 'good.' Man, I think actually, of all those, I liked Ghost Rider best. Wow.

 

[Krug]

I would have been happy if it was as good as Ghost Rider. Not sure what Miller was trying to achieve; it didn't even come anywhere near capturing Robert Rodriguez's style in Sin City, ironically.

 

[Mark Chance]

It ought not be surprising that The Spirit is bad. Frank Miller's star burned out years ago. Now he's a movie director? So that makes him what? A big budget Uwe Boll?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

On the plus side, if this thing flops, no one will greenlight Frank Miller's Wuthering Heights!

 

[Relique du Madde]

On the plus side, if this thing flops, no one will greenlight Frank Miller's Wuthering Heights!

Lol You know it would be set in Sin City, just like Frank Miller's Wide Sargasso Sea, Frank Miller's Huck Fin, and Frank Miller's Sesame Street...


Frank Miller's Oliver Twist might actually be interesting (if someone didn't do Oliver Twist 3 years ago)..

 

[Krug]

On the plus side, if this thing flops, no one will greenlight Frank Miller's Wuthering Heights!

He's going to take a stab at Buck Rogers next apparently.

Well Miller is no Boll. There are imaginative leaps and he does attempt, badly, to capture some of the comic's camp. But I can see he has trouble with actors; in fact, he might be a great animation director with his stark visuals. If this had come out before Sin City it would definitely be better received.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Wait...I think I'm having a vision from the future...

I see..the ultimate Frank Miller movie...

Frank Miller's The Old Man and the Sea.

 

[Villano]

Has anyone else seen the new commercials praising the film? Oddly, the quotes all seem to come from the same guy. And it's not even from some small newspaper, but a website.

I thought, "Oh, that's not good." So I went to wikipedia and checked out the "Reception" part of the film's entry and found this:

The film has received generally negative reviews from critics. It currently scores a 14% positive rating from 49 reviews, with only 7 being "fresh", on the movie review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the concensus being, "Though its visuals are unique, The Spirit's plot is almost incomprehensible, the dialogue is ludicrously mannered, and the characters are unmemorable." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material". Frank Lovece of Newsday, and a one-time comic book writer, found that, "Gorgeous cinematography and design can't mask the hollow core and bizarre ugliness of this mishandled comics adaptation," and noted that while Eisner's own Spirit was "an average-Joe [...] in a rumpled suit — a vulnerable but insouciant Everyman in humanist fables", Miller's Spirit "now has a superpower — a healing factor. Eisner's own spirit must be spinning in its grave". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, noting that he "stand outside the circle of comic-book obsessives", found the movie a "ludicrously knowing and mannered noir pastiche, full of burnt-end romance and 'style, but robotic at its core".A.O. Scott in The New York Times summed up, "To ask why anything happens in Frank Miller's sludgy, hyper-stylized adaptation of a fabled comic book series by Will Eisner may be an exercise in futility. The only halfway interesting question is why the thing exists at all".[

49 reviews and only 7 were positive? Yikes!