| Overall Grade: |
F |
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| Story: |
F |
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| Acting: |
F |
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| Direction: |
F |
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| Visuals: |
C- |
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|
In the Spirit of failure.
by Funnyways3 (movies profile)
Dec 26, 2008
59
of
67 people found this review helpful
The only way to truly describe this movie is a bad roller coaster ride in complete darkness. It's fun for a few seconds, but you quickly get tired of just being randomly thrown in different directions and eventually your gut starts wrenching. For two hours, my gut was wrenching and for 15 minutes of that, I thought it was the popcorn.
The Spirit tells the story of a cop who was on his second life and "granted" a gift as close to immortality as you can get. With a cliched, one-dimensional hatred for crime, he uses this gift to be this dark city's mysterious, nocturnal protector.
His nemesis is Mr. Octopus, over-played horribly by Samuel L. Jackson in such a way as I'm glad he didn't use the term "Mother-F***" because that would have implied this fine actor would have been allowed to make this character his own, and I just have too much respect for the great SJ.
Mr. Octopus has been looking for the secret of immortality, and finds it in the blood of Heracles or Hercules (the characters switch freely between the Greek and Roman). However, this blood is in the possession of Sand Serif, played to Eva Mendes standards by Eva Mendes herself, a money-grubbing vixen who abandoned her home of Central City and started on her journey to make diamonds her best friend.
As the Spirit, Mr. Octopus, and Sand Serif collide in what tries to be action-packed or meaningful sequences, you get hit with dialogue that makes anime seem like Shakespeare. I have never encountered a movie told entirely with expositions; it was to the point where I turned it into a drinking game. Had it been real alcohol, I would have passed out 10 minutes into the movie and been perfectly content with the resulting hangover as opposed to two more hours of pointless drabble.
The Spirit spends ten minutes explaining his method of thinking when it should only take one. Mr. Octopus monolauges to the point where you start believing his secret power is the ability to never shut up (in one such scene, he does this in a Nazi costume. Don't ask...just accept it.)
The visuals made a solid attempt, but serve as nothing more than eye candy, and as I was driving home from the theatre, I tried to figure out if any of the visuals helped explain the story and sadly, the answer was no. Even the fact that Scarlett Johanssen is hot was blantantly and repeatedly explained by Octopus' henchmen.
The Spirit tries to be fun; it tries to be classy; it tries to be mysterious; it tries to be action packed; and it tries to be beautiful and fails in every aspect. Even the scenes that were good in it (and there were some), were the equivalent of the breaths you get to take in the middle of vomitting. |
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