The Spirit

simply wasn't bad enough to be good. The trailer had convinced me that it wasn't going to be a seriously good movie, but I had high hopes that it could be the kind of bad movie that's big fun to watch. For the most part, though, it was not.

Kyle correctly observed that the movie would have benefitted from radical surgery, with many scenes and the entire back story best hacked off and fed down the disposal. The result would have been a one-hour HBO special, but that show might have been more fun to watch than the film.

None of this is to say that the movie provided nothing of value. Samuel L. Jackson chewed the scenery in ways that were at times highly entertaining. Watching Scarlett Johannson call some thugs "polyp" and "toejam" was fun. Paz Vega earned the immediate lust of every man in the audience. You also have to love any scene that contains the line, "And this one is for Muffin!"

Despite those fleeting pleasures, I can recommend this one only to hardcore Frank Miller fans or those, like me, willing to watch any comic-book-based film. (Oh, how did I miss that Punisher movie?)