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63The Spirit is uneven, but its campy adventure provides some amusing, escapist fun.
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63Should make comic modern-day fanboys happy, what with its dark undertones, its beat-it-to-a-pulp action and its sly winks at comic greats past and present. Everyone else, including fans of Will Eisner's original Spirit, may find themselves wondering what all the fuss is about.
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58The result is a great-looking movie with an awkward balance of pulp noir and campy self-awareness.
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50There are good things to be said about The Spirit, but not enough of them to outweigh the bad.
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50What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks.
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50As the vamps, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson might be posing for a fashion spread with just one note to play -- gorgeous high-bitch mockery.
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40Miller seems to have brought neither his brains nor his heart (both of which we know he's got) to this project. The style is willing. But the spirit is weak.
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Miller's flat, humorless yarn is set in Central City, a vacant metropolis whose only residents seem to be cops and crooks.
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40What is most striking about The Spirit is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to by sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once.
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38With its starkly contrasted visuals (fierce blacks, Clorox whites, a dash of unholy crimson), The Spirit may resemble a comic book more than any live-action film yet made, but it makes "Max Payne" look like a gleaming jewel of storytelling by comparison.
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38Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.
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38The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.
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38Not charming, but not cynical, The Spirit is wholly unrecommendable, but made with greater care than many movies that are.
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30Ultimately, it's a long, incoherent mess of a film, enlivened only by the sure knowledge that the great Will Eisner's original is available to one and all at your nearest comic-book shop.
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The fanboys will find room in their heart to forgive the desecration. Everyone else won't care at all.
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30Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.
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Doesn't just play like a cheap "Batman" knockoff, it plays like a cheap "Batman" knockoff that knows it's a cheap "Batman" knockoff -- and wants to be sure everybody knows it knows.
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25The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.
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25Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.
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25The Spirit feels like the follow-up to "Batman & Robin" no one wanted.
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20It is truly a mess.
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20Miller clearly wanted to make an impression, and that he does. Maybe it's better to be remembered for one of the worst movies of the year than forgotten for a mediocre one.
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16The movie is a septic tank of vapid noir posturing, bad narration, bizarre pacing, cartoonishly hot femme fatales and ineptly staged slapstick.
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0Throwing your $10.25 down a storm drain is a better idea; at least that way you won't feel the added self-loathing of wasting more than an hour and a half of your life watching Eva Mendes in the worst acting job of her career.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 52
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Mixed: 6 out of 52
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Negative: 26 out of 52
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