I Never Liked Bugs Bunny Either

The Spirit (one and a half stars total, even though you can plainly see two and a half stars pictured, because the dialogue was so atrocious I'm subtracting not one but two red stars) How can you make a movie even more violent than Kill Bill and still get a PG-13 rating? Easy, you just do it the Looney Tunes way. Speaking of which, my favorite scene from the Kill Bill double feature comes at the very end of the second movie, when The Bride character thinks she's saved her daughter from a life of violence with father Bill, but Looney Tunes plays in the background and puts a question mark on any such possible rescue. Now I would never dare to compare Kill Bill with The Spirit, but I just wanted to make a point with the former movie before going into my review of the latter. Frank Miller wrote and drew Sin City and 300, and directors Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder did well to stay true to his source material, but he does no such favor for Will Eisner's comic book/strip, The Spirit. I think the actor playing the main character got the facial expressions from the comic page right and Miller included Eisner's trademark rainfall, but that's about it. The cartoon violence (i.e. invulnerability and gore without blood), toilet humor, and repetitive, repetitive, repetitive dialogue is all Miller. This movie adaptation shares more in common with last year's Speed Racer than it does with Sin City, (just for the record, I liked both of those movies just the same but for different reasons). Cheap computer animation looked like even cheaper video game graphics and one of my favorite actresses, Scarlett Johansson, gave her worst performance ever. Avoid any scene with The Spirit running and Scarlett talking and you may have some fun. I think what happened is that the comics veteren/green director got too excited. He didn't think he'd get another chance to direct a movie so he tried to throw in every idea and pop culture reference that he could fit and the movie ended up being more concept and iconography than movie (i.e. lost mythological relics that grant magical powers; mad scientist gangsters that talk like James Bond villains and dress like Nazis; undead hands coming up out of fresh graves). To his credit though, the director gives the most enthusiastic history of the comic book medium in 15 minutes on the DVD special features.