Frank Miller applied all the knowledge he gained while co-directing Sin City with Robert Rodriguez to his follow up solo project The Spirit, a film that visually looks a lot like Sin City. However, while the visuals might be up to par with those of Sin City the story isn’t. The Spirit’s tale is just not as interesting.
In The Spirit, The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) much defeat his nemesis The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) before he becomes invincible. The Octopus with the help of (Pathos, etc) Louis Lombardi, which has some of the funnies scenes in the movie, and Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) are on a path for global domination. However, we never feel this threat is real enough as the characters are played a bit on the tongue and cheek side. The Spirit on the other hand is left to deal with The Octopus and Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), a childhood girlfriend who might be working for the wrong side.
The plot doesn’t offer much in the sense of intrigue. The most exciting elements of the plot where the origin story of out how The Spirit came to be. However, the worst thing about the movie is that Miller choose to keep the same style of acting used in Sin City where the characters deliver their lines overly dramatic with more tongue and cheek than I can handle. This day and age it’s hard to get these types of movies to work, audiences are looking for something real and gritty from their heroes.
The film is done entirely using CGI and has a nice and clean look, however they aren’t enough big set special effects pieces. The only two that stand out are near the beginning and at the climax. The look of the film gives it an almost black and white look. There are scenes where the only color is the red of The Spirit’s tie. Regardless, the movie looks fabulous on Blu-ray. However, this is also the source of other problem. The visuals are so nice looking that they distracted from the movie. Take for example, the snow, a lot of the scenes show snow falling and on Blu-ray the snow looks so beautiful that I sometimes lost my focus on the movie. The sound is also excellent, but be warned that action scenes and gun shots are loud, really loud.
The Blu-ray disc has some pretty nice features starting with Green World which describes the CGI techniques used for the movie, Miller on Miller where we get more information on the amazing mind of Frank Miller, a pretty cool alternated ending is also shown, but in story board form, a History Repeats feature where Miller speaks about Will Eisner the creator of The Spirit and an audio commentary by Frank Miller offering enough nuggets of info for those wanting to know all the in and outs of each scene.
The Spirit Blu-ray also marks the debut of the first LIONSGATE LIVE™ enabled title for the studio. LIONSGATE LIVE™ is a unique BD Live based menu system that delivers updateable exclusive content such as commentaries, games, ringtones, wallpapers, trailers and much more via a series of on-screen notifications and widgets. The Blu-ray Disc also features Molog, which allows users to insert and animate shapes, text, audio and other graphics right into the film as well as post “blogs” about the film to share with other registered MOLOG™ users. Unfortunately these features were not available at the time of the review
Review By Brad Peterson
Release Date: April 14, 2009
