Hola all. Massawyrm here.
What the hell were they thinking? In what is easily one of the biggest misfires of the year, Frank Miller spends every last bit of cred he’s earned and lets the co-director credit Robert Rodriguez gave him on Sin City go to his head in order to create a wildly demented, self-indulgent, jaw dropping masterpiece of ineptitude that never ceases to impress you with just how low your estimation of the talent of every artist involved can sink. If I were to tell you that Eva Mendez gave the best, most solid performance in the film you’d have no idea that what I was really saying was that she’s as consistently flat as ever and that everyone else in the film just sucks it up so hard that it will prove to be a blemish on their careers that follows them around for a very long time.
This is the Rocky Horror Picture Show of comic book movies, but without all the great songs. I GET what Miller was trying to do here. He just takes a healthy swig of epic fail and falls flat on his face in a movie that will induce cringe after cringe even to the most devoted of his fans. You HAVE to know what Miller is doing going into this – otherwise odds are you won’t be able to make heads or tails of it. This is a comedy. Miller is making something of a spoof, laughing at the whole masked hero, pulp comic book oeuvre. But like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which did the same thing for 50’s B-movie science fiction films, this has absolutely no sense of timing, very few clever ideas and simply mishandles the material every chance it gets. This film isn’t funny. Not intentionally. It is a painful 100 minute stand up act by someone not used to being on stage yet – it’s not that the jokes are bad, it’s that they don’t know how to tell them.
The Spirit isn’t just a failure, it is a spectacular failure; a turkey so loud and obnoxious that it will go down in cult film history, adored by those ready to embrace it for its worthlessness. There are moments of this that feel like community theatre – it’s like being dragged to a play starring that actress girlfriend of yours who can’t get through a single convincing line but gives the world’s greatest blowjobs so you sit and smile and nod your head to 2 hours of theatrical critique of the works of Nietzsche set to the music of Barry Gibbs. With Nazis.
Holy fuck is this thing asstastic – no doubt a Razzie award winning monstrosity lacking almost any merit whatsoever. In fact the only positive things that can be said about this film is that it looks BEAUTIFUL. Brilliant cinematographer Bill Pope lenses this as well as he lenses everything else and combined with the color correction and CG makes something that is stunning to look at. And with the sound turned off at a party, this might look incredible projected onto a wall. But the minute you hear words fall out of the character’s mouths all excitement wanes – for there isn’t an actor who shines, a piece of dialog or story that stands out as remotely interesting. For the cast of this film it is simply varying degrees of suck, starting with Eva Mendez and working its way down to the bottom of the fecal heap, Scarlett Johansson.
I have never been a fan of the much beloved “ScarJo”, thinking of her more as the sultry, hourglass figured vixen of the hour – competent enough to deliver a line but not so much as to be able to have a real career once her looks begin to fade. But here, she is positively dreadful – not just the worst of her career, but the worst I’ve seen from a name actor in years. Anyone who can make Eva Mendez look like a quality actress by comparison needs to have their SAG card revoked. Then burned. And its ashes spread across seven different continents lest they try to in some way reform.
You know what I want to do? I want to build a time machine and travel back meet the girl that shattered Frank Miller’s heart so badly he developed the inability to relate a real woman to an audience. And I want to tell her to stop. Because it was bad enough when Miller was simply humiliating and degrading the female characters in his books – but now he’s doing it to the flesh and blood actresses in his movies. Only Jamie King (who is almost altogether unrecognizable behind the CG beams of light and glittery jewels) manages to come away with her dignity intact, and then only because you probably won’t guess that it is her in the brief glimpses that she is on screen. I had a beer with her a few days before seeing this and I didn’t realize that was who I was watching.
But when the acting isn’t dropping your jaw (and it will – especially when you gaze upon Louis Lombardi’s incomprehensible grinning idiot performance), Miller’s complete inability to tell a story with moving pictures will continue the downward arc of your chops. This thing is FRAMED beautifully. But the transition from shot to shot seems forced, like being done by someone who understands how to tell a static story, but not one that actually has to take you from one side of the room to the other. The flow is entirely disjointed, and when coupled with an erratic pacing you end up with a film that never finds its groove, never lets you know how it wishes to proceed. It’s all over the place, a mess of incomprehensible proportion. Even after reading this thousand word tongue lashing of it, you still won’t be prepared for the sheer awfulness of it all.
They want to give this guy Buck Rogers? What, is there a draft floating around out there involving a future in which Wilma Derring is a stiffly acting prostitute with a robot pimp (biddybiddybiddybiddyFUCK) on a bleak and desolate earth? I hope to God nobody lets Miller convince them it’s a comedy. Hopefully they watch this before handing the keys over to the camera truck.
Oh yeah. Merry Christmas.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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