A Spiritless Film

The best part of The Spirit is the preview for Repo: The Genetic Opera.

I'm not joking. This is a bad, bad movie. The storyline is convoluted and doesn't really seem to have a point. Let's see...this guy died, and now he's an indestructible superhero who calls himself The Spirit (Gabriel Macht). All the women in the city are in love with him, and he's in love with all of them. Of course, he used to be in love with a girl named Sand Serif (Eva Mendez) whose dad was a cop, but he died, and she likes shiny things. There's this bad guy called Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) who is, um, an angry black man with 8 of everything, and he's got a smart sexy chick sidekick named Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) and a seemingly endless army of semi-retarded clones. And there's a cat.

So Octopus wants this trunk, because it has a vase full of the blood of Heracles, which will make him immortal. Except he sends the semi-retarded clones to get it while he fights The Spirit in a swamp, whacking him with a toilet. So, the clones accidentally grab an identical trunk which, instead of having a vase of blood, has the shiniest thing of all--which shiny-thing lover Sand wants. And Sand has the vase of blood! O, the hijinx!

The film has all the subtlety and facility of acting as a high school play. We're not talking about a school for the performing arts...we're talking about an entire drama club full of not-quite-functional illiterates who need to be fed each line one word at a time. The film appears to be kind of set in the 1940s, although cell phones (specifically the LG enV), photocopiers and online banking are key elements of the plot. At one point, Octopus puts on a Nazi uniform.

Frankly, I have no idea what this film is about. It's pointless. And the special effects, which were so good in Sin City were lame. Mostly they relied on weird color saturation. And the worst part is that they left an opening for a SEQUEL!

Honestly, if the film were a 20-minute kindergarten sock-puppet production it would be vastly superior to the feature film. If you haven't seen it, I'd avoid it like swine flu--although the flu will probably leave you feeling less sickly.