New footage from Frank Miller's The Spirit has the Octopus and the Spirit duking it out through a murky cess-pool. It looks like the retarded baby from Sin City. Miller is truly just hell-bent on taking all of the fun out of this remake and just making it his own foul creation. Plus, somebody get the Octopus some waterproof eyeliner for the love of god.
Aug 13, 2008 08:20 AM
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New footage from Frank Miller's The Spirit has the Octopus and the Spirit duking it out through a murky cess-pool. It looks like the retarded baby from Sin City. Miller is truly just hell-bent on taking all of the fun out of this remake and just making it his own foul creation. Plus, somebody get the Octopus some waterproof eyeliner for the love of god.
I am aware that a lot of Will Eisner's original Spirit comic was tongue-in-cheek. Girls parachuting from the sky to madly rip off the Spirit's clothes is good old fashioned silly camp, and I'm open to it. So I see what Frank Miller is trying to capture here, but his jokes fall flat with the style and delivery. Sorry, Frank, you need light hand when directing slapstick comedy. You can't just give Sam Jackson a big wrench and say, "Go for it!" Because honestly that's what this whole scene looks like, two guys rolling around in crap but stopping to pause for the obligatory one-liner. Poor Jackson even tries to deliver the lines the best way he knows how. Truth be told, I even enjoy the Octopus' little crazy-person dance, but overall it's not funny, it's not light hearted, and from the amounts of Spirit I've been exposed to it is no where near what I'd expected or hoped for.
Second, and probably the most important issue on why this just doesn't work, it looks like the movie Sin City pissed all over it. It clashes with the banter the script is so desperately trying to make witty. The crap that the two characters are mucking around in looks.... like crap, and soundstage crap at that. I understand having a "signature look" but can't Miller smell his own shit when it stinks? And this is a big one. What happened to the color of The Spirit? Isn't his suit blue? Are colors not allowed in Miller's world? It's not balanced it looks like a gritty world with forced banter, I'm sure you can have both, but Miller certainly didn't figure out how. Oh and I'm not even touching the slow-mo kick moment.
Still, the hardest part for me to watch is Samuel L Jackson as the Octopus. If anyone could make those cheesy lines work with his dance acting it's Jackson, but my god, that eyeliner. What the hell were they thinking? He looks like the world's saddest drag queen. That is unforgivable.
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
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