Spirit, Knight, Watchmen.

"A slain cop is resurrected as a masked crime-fighter in The Spirit but Frank Miller's solo writing-directing debut plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "Pushing well past the point of self-parody, Miller has done Will Eisner's pioneering comicstrip no favors by drenching it in the same self-consciously neo-noir monochrome put to much more compelling use in Sin City.... If this summer's The Dark Knight raised the bar for seriousness, ambition and dramatic realism in the comicbook-based superhero genre, The Spirit reps its antithesis: Relentlessly cartoonish and campy, it's a work of pure digital artifice, feverishly committed to its own beautiful, hollow universe to the exclusion of any real narrative interest or engagement with its characters."

Updated through 12/25.

"Why So Serious?" For Newcity Chicago, Ray Pride surveys the offerings of the season and finds himself returning to The Dark Knight: Christopher Nolan "felt a mood and forged a dark and sufficiently ambiguous series of metaphors for contemporary ills that pro- and anti-vigilante interpretations are equally convincing. Even though everyone's seen it, it may be the most apt holiday movie."

"Watchmen could very well sound the death knell for superhero cinema as we know it," writes Daniel Steadman in Seven: "when faced with this dark, brutal tale of public disorder, international conflict and the threat of global terrorism, men in tights shooting webs or lifting planes begin to look a little preposterous."

Updates, 12/20: "Three years after Sin City, the technique of imposing actors on animated backdrops is wearing a little thin," writes Screen's Mike Goodridge. "Miller is a visionary when it comes to imagery and design, but the dark, dreary setting of Central City sometimes overwhelms The Spirit. Whereas Sin City kept the audience visually distracted with multiple storylines, this film demands that the audience stay in one murky visual milieu for a not-short 108 minutes, and it tests the patience.... Having said that, Miller's script is run through with a wry sense of humour which gives the film some buoyancy, and his actors gamely engage in the noir mood, throwing out one-liners and sexual innuendo with gay abandon."

Paul Matwychuk is amazed, and not in a good way, at "the sheer awfulness of Miller's script, which makes one terrible, inexplicable choice after another.... I had the same relationship with The Spirit that Kif from Futurama has with Zapp Branigan: it seems like every 40 seconds or so, it comes out with something so stupid I can't help but shudder and make an audible little groan of dismay."

Kevin Maher meets Eva Mendes for the London Times.

Update, 12/21: "The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich says that [Samuel L] Jackson is going through his Joan Crawford phase, complete with bulging eyeballs and obsessively sticking to his actor tics," notes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "If that's the case, then Jackson has hit a rock bottom with The Spirit that's comparable only to Crawford's appearance in Trog. If I'm highlighting Jackson's performance as the Octopus, grand mastermind of evil, perhaps it's because he's the only presence on screen that genuinely registers."

Update, 12/23: Geoff Boucher profiles Gabriel Macht for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/24: "[T]he movie's so full of nods to comics and their creators (from DC Comics founder Harry Donenfeld to artist Steve Ditko) that the fanboys will find room in their heart to forgive the desecration," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "Everyone else won't care at all."

But writing in the L Magazine, Henry Stewart finds The Spirit to be "a playful and self-conscious story of jewel heists, magic potions and disposable goons, pitched at children (or, adults' sense of childlike escape), that deals in mock-Chandler voice-overs and the stylized dialogue of 30s radio programs. It's the bat-tithesis of Christian Bale brooding, a welcome respite from the often extremist Comic Books Are Serious position dominating the public discussion. Just because they can be doesn't mean they always have to be."

Update, 12/25: "Miller's script lacks the mythic echoes and the human vulnerability of the best of the recent superhero films," writes Sean Axmaker in the Parallax View, "and his direction lacks the humanizing touches that can pull an audience into an unreal world. This world remains flat and distant, a tipsy balance of Miller's brand of two-fisted pulp exaggeration with slapstick action and camp flourishes that can't decides if it wants to be taken seriously or not. It might have looked good on paper, but then this isn't a paper medium. It's cinema, and for a man schooled in the differences by Eisner himself, you'd think he's have taken the lesson to heart."

In the New York Times, AO Scott wonders "why, somewhere in the middle of The Spirit, Samuel L Jackson and Scarlett Johansson arrive on screen decked out in swastikas and jackboots. Nothing in the logic of the film explains it, but then, to use the phrase 'the logic of the film' when talking about The Spirit may be to take the 'oxy' out of 'oxymoronic.'"

"The Spirit ran in the Sunday sections of newspapers through 1952, and it's revered (for good reason) by comic book fans to this day," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "You can't blame Miller for wanting to adapt it to the big screen. But while Miller certainly has a strong visual sense (as a comic book artist, he knows how to compose beautifully within the frame), he's clueless about movement and pacing, and his actors seem to have no idea what's going on, either."

"As a babe-delivery system, The Spirit is a rousing success," notes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "In every other sense, it's a pronounced failure."

For Josef Braun, "this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience."

"Gone were Eisner's primary colors, replaced by muddy and amateurish black-and-white visuals with digitally added snow that never seemed to stick," writes Ed Champion. "The Spirit was so bad that it made Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy look like a masterpiece."

For the SpoutBlog's Kevin Buist, this is "an elaborately stylized train wreck."

"Eva Mendes gives the movie a mild jolt as Denny's childhood flame Sand Saref, now an international thief with a thing for plunging necklines," notes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "But even comic-book characters need souls, and Miller's have none."

Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2008 2:44 PM