The Spirit

A bad marketing campaign plus very campy acting creates the film "The Spirit," a story of a nearly indestructible hero who is also a womanizer.

What I expect out of s superhero film is the conflict between the identities of the person and the hero he or she tries to be. This is no hero film because the identity of The Spirit, Denny Colt, is dead. Instead the question of the hero is not really who is he, but what is he. A ghost or a phantom? He likes to call himself the Spirit of his city (he really loves his city, and one of my friends referred to the Spirit not being the spirit of the city, but the b*tch of it). So the story is set-up, but it just goes in wrong directions.



The marketing campaign for this film made it look like a hero movie, or something that might be in the style of "Sin City." Now I know the whole back story about Frank Miller, his writing, his work on "Sin City" and how he became involved with "The Spirit." So what I was expecting was not at all what I saw.

"The Spirit" is visually great and lots of eye candy, but that ends the decent package of the film. The story runs very thin (Sam Jackson wants to become immortal by drinking an ancient Greek hero's blood) and the characters aren't really that interesting. I never felt for anyone when they were sad or happy. A good film should make characters have a range of emotions, a great film has the audience have a range of emotions for the characters.



There are many flaws to this film, and it could have been made very differently. I will not claim to know much about the Spirit (a character from the WWII era), so maybe making a movie of an unknown wasn't such a great idea (though Marvel has banked on B-list characters from the comics). I am not going to say it is worth a watch or don't see it. It is a judgement that you should make on whether you like really campy stories (that have everything but the kitchen sink, which this film does have) or whether you prefer the other kind of hero tales.

4.6/10 "I'm gonna kill you all kinds of dead."