When I was 14, I played Hans Van Daan in a summer-school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. My performance was the stilted kind of awful you’d expect from a self-conscious teenager; I tended to accent every line with my hands bolted to my side as I paced back and forth, eyes fixed to the same invisible point off-stage. I awkwardly interrupted others in the play, not knowing when to begin talking, and I found comfort in hiding behind the scant furniture we had. Needless to say, I was bad. Little did I realize, though, that all of this could someday qualify me to act in a Frank Miller film.
Mistakenly thinking Miller was the creative half of the Sin City directorial duo, and considering the man’s first-hand experiences with bad Hollywood interpretations of his work, combined with his unmistakable debt to Will Eisner, I expected The Spirit to be an breathtaking neo-noirÑMickey Spillane bathed in blurring, black-and-white special effects. Instead, it looked like something some friends and I might have made when we were teenagers, would we have had a garage-full of computers, millions of dollars in sets and costumes, and any kind of sway with Samuel L. Jackson. There is absolutely no reason for this film to be as bad as it is – the visuals alone should be able to distract from any shortcomings – and yet it is stupefyingly horrendous. The acting – from Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, and especially Scarlett Johansson – is unabashedly wooden and underthought, with the latter’s bespeckled sex-pot trying oh-so desperately to seem like the intellectual femme fatal, twirling her umbrella and sporting Nazi costumes while delivering her lines as though she’s just now reading them off a quick-moving teleprompter.
I was hoping that, like The Happening, there was a plausible reason for the acting to be as bad as it was – a directorial touch, perhaps a commentary on the coldness of cinematic violence or the abrasiveness of certain graphic novels – but I couldn’t find any. Perhaps Miller should have spent more time prepping his actors and less time, shall we say, killing Fluffy.
by Adam Balz | Source: Theatrical Print
09 Jan 2009 10:54 AM | Comments (1)
i agree with this review completely i too was higly disappointed by the film
roena
15 January 2009
12:56 PM