Frank Miller's "The Spirit" crashes and burns, hard...

At any rate, Rottentomatoes currently has it at 15% (Top Critics = 6%), somewhere between Superman IV and Star Trek V. Jesus, Frank; what the hell? Have they even heard of movies or comics in your village?

I’m strangely disappointed. The ads made it pretty clear that it was not going to be too good in light of the source material, but I wasn’t expecting reviews THAT bad. Miller’s own material has been used to produce a couple of successful films already, and this didn’t look to be all that different (or, indeed, different at all).

I guess this probably also kills any chances for other film treatments of the Spirit, which seems like a damn shame. I always thought that it’d be the most natural thing in the world to adapt the character to movies, but apparently not.

It’s been looking like a disaster from the first trailer. Miller might profess to love the Spirit and respect Eisner, but it was clear he was going to trash it and make another Sin City. But it’s clear that instead of doing the Spirit, he wanted some sort of superhero powers (which the Spirit really didn’t have*) to tack on.

The Spirit would be better served as a TV series, anyway – that would be closest to the original, which were short stories themselves. There was a lot of variety, too – humor, horror, crime, etc. – that could be explored in a series.

*Yes, he could take a beating, but like a film noir hero, not a superhero.

Repo! The Genetic Opera has a terrible rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I loved it. YMMV. I think The Spirit looks kinda interesting, and I might catch it in theaters.

The first trailer I saw for The Spirit did nothing to make me want to see it. Granted, I never read the original comic or Miller’s treatment of it but the dialogue was so bad. “I’m going to kill you all kinds of dead” and “Somebody get me a tie and it damn sure better be red!” Uh, yeah, sure, whatever. I also had a problem with it looking so much like Sin City. Now I actually enjoyed Sin City but I didn’t need another movie that looked just like it. Unless we’re talking about another Sin City movie of course.

Odesio

I should not be indulging in so much schadenfreude right now. I really, really shouldn’t.

:smiley:

It was painful to hear that Miller was going to direct The Spirit. I hope someone with talent takes it on someday. I saw a snippet of an interview with Samuel Jackson. Of course he had to say positive things but you could tell he was embarrassed.

Bear in mind that the professional geeks hate it to - I haven’t seen such vitriol at aintitcool.com since Battlefield Earth.

My feelings exactly - I would LOVE to see Sin City II - I just don’t want it to be called The Spirit.

I held onto a slim sliver of hope that the early trailer was a piss-take, that Miller was sitting back, laughing about how everyone EXPECTED him to turn The Spirit into Sin City II, and he was actually going to make a movie that was actually in the proper spirit.

I was not at all happy to have that sliver ruthlessly ripped from me by all the later trailers, posters, and news.

I feel kind of bad for Miller. If you make a bad movie based on your own stuff, well, it’s not good. Make a bad movie based on the work of someone you had a student-mentor relationship with and really admired…that’s gotta suck on multiple levels.

Maybe they’ll take the Buck Rogers movie away from him now.

It’s Miller’s own fault. He’s been getting this exact same criticism (that he’s just plugging characters into Sin City and calling it a day) at least since 2006 when All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder began. He knows exactly what he’s doing and doesn’t seem to care. I thought his respect for Eisner would keep him from totally shitting all over The Spirit, but apparently I was wrong.

Watching this preview makes me wonder why he didn’t just do Sin City 2 finally, when it’s painfully clear he wanted to.

But was the movie really pretty?

Not necessarily…after all, half-assed films haven’t kept The Punisher off the silver screen.

I’ll still probably see it. Rotten Tomatoes is usually so far from my perspective that it is almost a given that I’ll hate it if they give it a high mark and vice versa. Not always, but often enough.

Well yes, but the Punisher has his own distinct set of problems. Adapting the Spirit to film is (or should be) a matter of successfully translating the tone and character of the original material. But the Punisher was a ripoff to begin with. He has no original character or tone, just a pirate T-shirt. Dozens upon dozens of generic paramilitary action films made over the last 40 years could just as easily have been a Punisher movie.

Maybe if the Punisher had been introduced to the moviegoing public in a big-budget film that incomprehensibly merged his Vietnam/Mafia origin with that one story arc where he goes to Hell to fight demons, we might not have seen a big rush to make new Punisher films.

I think the Spirit’s situation is somewhat closer to that of John Constantine at this point. In fact, there’s supposedly a new John Constantine movie in the works; of course, it’s a sequel to the Keanu Reeves film. Likewise, this Spirit movie pretty much guarantees that any future film adaptations will be faithful to the Miller movie rather than attempt to start from scratch.

The Spirit isn’t like the Hulk or Batman, where movie companies can be persuaded to try a new approach because they feel the character is strong enough to draw in new audiences. Hell, they didn’t even have enough faith in Superman as a character to break from the Christopher Reeve film continuity.

For 50 years, the window has been open to make a creditable film adaptation of the Spirit. That window has now been nailed shut.
Now that I think about it… how did Lions Gate secure the rights to film the Spirit in the first place? Isn’t the character a DC/Warner Brothers property these days? Not that Warner’s would necessarily have done it any differently, but they do seem to rely slightly less on toilet-based violence than Lions Gate films do.

Definitely not arguing that this was anything but Miller shooting himself in the foot; the guy’s been on a self-indulgent downslide for years now (and I didn’t ever care for his writing or art much to start). Still think it’s sad, though, for Miller and Eisner, that more people are going to associate The Spirit with Miller’s creative thud than with the source material.

Hard to tell. Eisner owned the Spirit, and I’d be surprised if his estate was foolish enough to sell all rights to DC.

I think the anger is simply because the comic could have made a pretty good movie by anyone who respected the source material. The worst thing about Miller is that he professed a great deal of respect for Eisner, but seems to show no respect at all for the character, even giving him a superpower when Eisner specifically wanted to avoid that.

According to imdb.com, Miller is working on both Sin City 2 and Sin City 3.

The Trib gave it one star. One.

Are we SURE that Miller isn’t getting vengeance on Eisner for some perceived slight, then? I mean, really, really sure?