BEFORE: I rode the Amtrak Acela up to my parent's house in suburban Mass. - I've got a couple of events coming up this weekend, so I figured I'd head up a few days early to get some R&R. Fortunately my DVDs are very portable, and I can stay current while NOT recording movies at home, which helps reduce the size of my list. I found some beers that I left here at Christmastime - it's like a gift from my past self - so I put together a Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout with some coffee ice-cream from Mom & Dad's freezer, making a nice beer float...I must remember to thank myself for that.
Speaking of the past, last night's film featured Nick Fury, a character who's a throwback to the WW2 era - so let's follow that with another retro character, based on Will Eisner's famous newspaper strip "The Spirit", which I admit I'm not very familiar with.
THE PLOT: Rookie cop Denny Colt returns from the beyond as The Spirit, a hero whose mission is to fight against the bad forces in Central City.
AFTER: In another nifty coincidence, the new Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson, who also appears as the main villain, the Octopus, in this film.
The recurring question is, should a comic-book superhero movie play it straight (like "Superman" or "The Dark Knight") or go for crazy schtick (like "Superman IV" or "Batman and Robin")? This film ends up trying to be serious, but somehow, inevitably, the camp factor got dialed up to 11.
The Spirit is a revived cop who also has emormous charisma with the ladies - but he doesn't have any idea where he got his healing powers - sort of like the Wolverine of the 1940's. But wait, what year is this film supposed to take place? The fashions and cars look like they're from the 1930's or 1940's, but there's modern technology like cell-phone cameras. So, which is it? Or did the filmmakers think that the audience wouldn't be interested in a story set in the past?
The Spirit is such a non-entity, though, that Samuel L. Jackson essentially steals the show as the more dynamic Octopus - but Scarlett Johansson as his cohort, Silken Floss, seems like she would rather be anywhere else. And the REAL eye candy is Eva Mendes as the Spirit's teen girlfriend, who grew up to be an international jewel thief and seductress. Damn, she's got it goin' on. But her character's name is Sand Saref - a little joke for all the comic-book letterers in the audience, which they punch up about 12,000 times. People simply don't walk around referring to everyone by their first and last names - it's like that character named "Barbara Dahl" in "Spy Hard" - all right, we get it already! Another female character, named "Plaster of Paris" is almost as poorly named...
The whole film is mostly monochromatic black and white, with the occasional splash of red, any time blood gets shed, or the Spirit wears a red tie - much like the color scheme of another comic-book film, "Sin City". This film ends up feeling like a combination of "Sin City", "Watchmen" and "Pulp Fiction" - right down to the mysterious glowing box...
Also starring Gabriel Macht (who?) as The Spirit, Dan Lauria (the father from "The Wonder Years"), Louis Lombardi (the large FBI agent from "The Sopranos"), Eric Balfour (from "Six Feet Under") and character actor Richard Portnow (Howard Stern's dad in "Private Parts")
RATING: 6 out of 10 sewer grates
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