Scene of the Week: The Spirit fights The Octopus
The Spirit is a film, on the surface, that appears to be nothing more than some gimmicky looking comic book movie that lacks any real semblance of story or good characterization. But, if you dig a little deeper you’ll find that it’s actually just a massive piece of shit movie that somehow got funded based on the success of Sin City and Frank Miller’s fading fame.
The Spirit‘s failure, to me, wasn’t because the actors didn’t have talent or that the look of the film was all that bad. It had a shitty script, no doubt, and I can’t really praise Frank Miller behind the camera, but I liked Gabriel Macht quite a bit and think that he pulled off the look of a noir hero very well. Maybe my brain was caught in a haze from the ScarJo/Eva Mendes/Jaime King hotness draining my vital organs of their necessary blood levels but Macht never seemed like he was in over his head at any point and that is rare for an actor surrounded by so much overacting Sam Jackson and so many beautiful women.
This scene will do a better job than any other in the movie at symbolizing what is wrong with the film as a whole. They throw absolutely everything they can into this fight scene and it still reeks like a back-alley dumpster. I’m no expert on the source material but if this film is anywhere near what goes on in the pages of those books than we may never get a second go at the character known as The Spirit.
