By Hayley Trowbridge

This review contains spoilers.

Coming from visionary director, Frank Miller (Sin City, 2005 and 300, 2006) it comes as no surprise that his latest cinema release, The Spirit, is visually electric. Combining three distinct ocular styles, The Spirit could have been Miller’s masterpiece to-date but when all the elements were brought together this disjointed film just fell apart.

The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) watches over the city, his city. The city provides for him and he looks after her. In a previous life The Spirit was the young and idealistic cop, Denny Colt. After a fatal shooting, Colt is unknowingly brought back to life by The Octopus (Samuel L Jackson) who later becomes his arch enemy. Working in allegiance with, yet independent of the police, The Spirit attempts to purge his city of its villains. But when an old-flame returns The Spirit must up his game and rid the city of his nemesis, The Octopus.

Stunning to look at yet lacking in substance, that’s what The Spirit is. Separately the three visual styles – Sin City-esque, graphic novel and hyper-reality – would work wonderfully but when chopped together like some cocaine-induced nightmare they make one another look pretentious and unjustified. The styles are not incorporated into one another well. Instead they make one another look out of place. Perhaps this alienation technique was intended by Miller but it was just too much to handle.

It’s such a shame that it failed because the film looks amazing. It was like looking at art. The hyper-real scenes (particularly the Bond-esque scene in which the Octopus is about to kill The Spirit) are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick at his best and should be applauded. But the way they were integrated into the film was with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The white-blood gunk (as seen in Sin City) still looks great. The interplay of black and white, shadows and light and the stand-out reds are inspiring but seem totally alien when blended together with one another, with the bit of the hyper-real thrown in for good measure. It is a melting pot of excess.

The performances fluctuate between brilliance and shoddiness, sometimes within the same scenes. I assume the acting was supposed to be ‘bad’ acting in some parts to play up to the film’s style yet at points the performances (particularly that of Gabriel Macht) jump from serious to absurd with no real instigating factor.

The randomness of the film should be applauded – The Octopus’s ‘egg on the face’ lines, and the clones are particularly great, and surreal too; but I think Miller has just pushed this too far. At parts he teeters on the edge of a cliff in terms of the eccentricity, and at these moments the film is great, but in numerous parts of the film Miller falls (or perhaps jumps) off the cliff, heading down into the depths of self-indulgence. And it is these self-indulgent moments that ruins what could have been a great film.

The pace of the film also does not live up to the precedent set by Sin City. It again seems to fluctuate between a fast-pace and a desperately slow one. Early on, the audience is screaming for more but then later they’re falling asleep. It seems in the slower paced scenes Miller’s screenplay is trying to reproduce quirky, dialogue-heavy scenes as found in much of Quentin Tarantino’s films, but here it doesn’t work. Miller seems much more at home writing the breathy monologues/voiceovers and this is where he should stay as they work well (overtly emotive and exaggerated but nevertheless, within the context of the film, they are appropriate).

Miller was trying to make some bold statements in this film but the problem with bold statements is that when they are being made for the point of making a bold statement then they very rarely have the desired effect and I think that it is this that has ruined The Spirit. Perhaps a remake with a bit less pretence, this movie would become the beautiful film it should have been.