Movie Review - The Spirit

The Spirit was a halfway enjoyable movie as long as you don't have anything else going on that you would rather be doing.

First let me say that I was not a huge fan of Sin City and I never saw 300, but The Spirit looked interesting and of course the eye candy throughout was what drew me to it.

The love story portrayed in the bunch of flashback scenes shown were adorable and I would have preferred to have seen the story play out with just those characters. The Eva Mendes characters (both past and present) definitely made for the best scenes, and out of all of the actors, I thought she did the best job. (That should tell you right there how poorly the "greats" were when it came time for their scenes.)

A few problems I had that kept me from enjoying most of the movie:

Sam Jackson. His acting is starting to get annoying for me. I just hate it when an.ac.tor.has.to.e.nun.ci.ate.e.ver.y.line.in.a.moo.vie. Aaaaaaah! Nails on a chalkboard for me! And he did this in EVERY scene he had!

Scarlett Johannson. I like her in pretty much every movie she's been in that I've seen. Even Scoop which would have been a really stupid movie had it not been for her presence. But in this one, she dropped her voice about two octaves for her part. Why? To sound sexy? Her voice is plenty sexy enough as-is. By dropping her voice extra low combined with her trying to be a comic book actor, she simply sounded like a robot. A good-looking, nicely dressed robot. But still a robot. (And let me tell you, the scenes with just Sam and Scarlett were almost unbearable.)

Paz Vega. She was put in the film purely for eye candy. It's apparent. That's fine. I'm all for eye candy, but they shouldn't have let her talk. At all. She was doing fine just dancing around our hero while trying to get info out of him and teasing him with her body movements. But as soon as she started talking....trying to sound tough and menacing...toss up between Sam and Paz for horrible acting. Very painful listening to it. Thankfully, her scenes were few.

The angel of death. Was that really Jaime King? Wow, she's really come a long way since her small role in Blow. In the trailers, I kept thinking that was Carmen Electra. (Go ahead and tell me you didn't think the same thing.) Anyway, the character would appear out of nowhere, every 10 or 15 minutes or so, signaled by a weird heavenly sounding vocalization and then some more awful acting would be had while she's floating around either in the water or in the air and the whole thing just felt like, I don't know...a commercial almost. I don't think you're supposed to expect to see commercials while you're watching a movie at the movie theater. It was just weird. After the third appearance with the same intro, I was getting really annoyed with her presence on screen.

The snow. It was very pretty and created several romantic scenes, but it was so obviously fake that there were people walking around in scantily clad clothing not even showing a shiver! When it's coming down that hard and that thick, dammit, I wanna see someone acknowledging that it is cold outside. I don't want to see someone flouncing around in a belly dancer's outfit like it's summer.

The overextended fight scenes. Our hero and villian are punching each other in the face and trying to drown one another in both water and then later mud and even after finding out that each one cannot die, they continue punching each other and trying to kill the other. For several minutes. The fight scenes weren't really that great, anyway and I was left with the feeling of "What was the point of it again?".

So all that said, I certainly don't see this as being "best movie of the year" as I've seen a few trailers advertise this. FAR from it. But it was still worth a look. I really wish they would have had more of the flashback scenes. I can't tell you enough how interesting that storyline was, and THOSE actors were less fake sounding than the rest. I wanted more of those scenes. Maybe I'll get lucky and there will be extended scenes on the dvd.

My opinion would be to just wait til it comes out on dvd and maybe watch it on mute with closed captioning, only taking it off mute for Eva's scenes. That way you can still know what's going on with the plot of the movie and look at the occasional stunning visual effects without having to listen to the poorly performed scenes of the rest of the cast. Then, there's a good chance you will enjoy the movie.

Vixy :]