The Haunting in Connecticut is a letdown in two ways. The first and more expected of the two is that the film, marketed squarely in the horror genre, is not horrific at all. On the contrary, like a birthday party magician, we’ve seen all its tricks before, usually in older, better movies. We’ll get to those tricks later. Second, the plainness of the movie lowers the esteem of its young director, an Aussie named Peter Cornwell.

Long ago, Cornwell worked as a sound recordist for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In his spare time, he created claymation shorts. Claymation is a portmanteau word for an animation technique whereby clay figurines are positioned, photographed, slightly repositioned, photographed, slightly repositioned, photographed again, on and on until the filmmaker collapses from exhaustion. Projecting the images in rapid sequence (24 frames per second) creates the illusion of fluid movement. Claymation films have a distinctive look—think Chicken Run or Wallace and Gromit. If you’ve ever seen a film reel, you know all movies are nothing more than a series of quick photographs, but with stop-motion, the frame-by-frame adjustments means there’s nothing quick about it.

Cornwell spent years, yes, years painstakingly crafting his 15-minute film Ward 13, about a patient trying to escape an evil hospital. It was worth it. Ward 13 is funny, smartly written, expertly paced, riffs on and subverts cinematic conventions, smashes genres together, and holds your attention from start to exhilarating finish. In short, the short is amazing.

Flash-forward to today, after Cornwell rode his wave of success across the Pacific to Los Angeles, to his American live-action feature debut, The Haunting in Connecticut. The film is about a teenager, riddled with cancer, whose family relocates to a house close to his treatment clinic. The house was formerly a mortuary and the home of a powerful séance. It’s easy to see why Cornwell took on the project—the premise plays into his sensibilities.

Cornwell borrows his scare tactics from the classics, which worked well in Ward 13, a pseudo-horror film never meant to scare anyone, but falls dead in Haunting. The film’s ghosts are first glimpsed in mirrors—a favourite of Orson Welles. Then they are glimpsed in flashes of light—see The Exorcist (1973). Other touches include a beauty taking a shower, a flock of birds, doors slamming shut and approaching footsteps—all covered by Alfred Hitchcock, father of pop horror, in Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Rear Window (1954).

But there is a third grievance, beyond the mediocrity and the director, though related to them. Ask yourself this. Where is Connecticut? Could you find it on a map? Is it a city or a state? Don’t feel too stupid. You’re not supposed to know. Why should any of us be expected to know that Connecticut is a coastline New England state below New York in northeastern America? This is the preposterous state of affairs in which we find ourselves, being force-fed useless arcana about the United States because our media diet is so narrow.

America does not make higher-quality movies than anywhere else—French, German and Italian films, for instance, are just as well-acted and well-directed. America does not make more profitable movies than anywhere else—many of its big studios are in debt. America does not even make more movies than anywhere else—that honour goes to India. Yet where are all the Brazilian, Nigerian and Indian movies? Exhibited nowhere, distributed by no one in Jamaica. We are stuck, for the time being, with The Haunting in Connecticut.

Balfour Anderson, as described in the programme notes for No Compromise, has written 15 one-act plays and twice as many feature-length shows, including a couple L.T.M. pantomimes, supposedly our premier national showcase. The man has spent a lot of time putting pen to paper, or word to screen, or whatever his preferred method. Why, then, is his new play, about an office relationship, so flawed?

Why does Mr Thomas, a longtime executive, have it in for Monique, the new marketing manager, apart from the need for her character to face obstacles? Does Kathy, her best friend, have any purpose in life other than to visit Monique? Given that all Kathy does is offer Monique a willing ear, why does Monique talk awkwardly to herself in her office and apartment, instead of to Kathy as she otherwise does? Why does every sequence stretch well beyond its need? The first performance ran until quarter to eleven, not least because every sequence in the first act requires a set change. Most of Act Two takes place in a single master bedroom. Most of Act One, with little accommodation, could have transpired inside Monique’s office at Exquisite Perfumes.

The most serious flaw, however, is that Anderson abandons his protagonists in the second act. Up to intermission, their drives are clear—Stanley Preston, better at capturing scents than mates, is looking for a second chance at love; Monique Smith, having bounced between jobs, locations and relationships, is looking for stability at work and at home.

The first half of No Compromise is thus quite enjoyable, as Stanley and Monique dance around their attraction. Actors Bobby Smith and Aisha Davis fall short of looking in love, but their performances are still entertaining. Both make good use of their physicality. Smith has the air of a man who has always eaten well, and he borrows something from the pantaloon of old Italian theatre. Davis deploys her dancerly figure with the right restraint, teasing us as well as her fellow actors. Their scenes together, of which there are many, seem comfortable, although Davis may have been distracted by opening night jitters. Smith is at ease playing his enamoured businessman.

But having more or less achieved their objectives, the second act leaves them stranded, and No Compromise never fully recovers. Nadia Khan as confidante Kathy and Ainsley Whyte in dual roles as Mr Thomas and Pastor Myrie energize the stage with their comic timing and presence, but the actors cannot (and should not) rescue the drifting script.

Bobby Clarke’s direction is adequate, although the blocking (the art of moving the actors on the stage) could have better correlated with Stanley and Monique’s proximity to their goals, and the state of their relationship. Sound design is thoroughly effective, if a little conspicuous—music spilling through a security entrance evokes an entire nightclub; the noises of cell phones, which proliferate on the set, add a touch of realism.

Playwright Anderson tackles one of the unwieldy universals—the search for love. He gives us two of life’s messy acts—the excitement of the chase, and the stultifying routine that can subsequently steal in, like parasitic vines, and strangle a relationship. It’s just too bad No Compromise follows the same trajectory.

Is it fair to unload years of accumulated frustration on a single film? Is it fair to expect a movie designed to be profitable to also be profound? Is it fair to criticize a product for being itself?

In New in Town, Renée Zellweger is a high-powered Miami executive whose higher-powered corporate heads assign her to downsize a food factory in rural Minnesota. There, she has to battle snow, small-town values and Harry Connick, Jr., the local union representative. The usual misadventures follow like so many bland protein bars off the assembly line—she wears stilettos to the plant, she drives into a snowdrift, she falls in love. Personal desire and professional ambition dovetail. Transnational financial imperatives and the livelihoods of the workforce converge. City and country meld. Alan Ladd rides off into the sunset. Okay, everything except the last bit.

New in Town has all the ingredients of a romantic comedy, but director Jonas Elmer hews too strictly to the recipe printed on the box office. Is it fair to unload years of accumulated frustration on a single film? Yes. The creative talent behind the film, including writers Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox (Sweet Home Alabama), failed to get creative, to bend the formula without breaking it.

That is what all great genre films do—they redefine the genre. The old remarriage romantic comedies of the 1940s, like His Girl Friday, had mile-a-minute repartee; New in Town has a thong joke (“No, I said wear something you can get dirty.”). When Harry Met Sally (1989) had a pair of instantly likeable leads in Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan; when Harry meets Renée in New in Town, there’s no spark, just a pair of Hollywood veterans, one looking old and tired, the other unnaturally young.

And where Ms Zellweger puts her Botox on display, there’s money to be made. Is it fair to expect a movie designed to be profitable to also be profound? Yes. Michael Clayton (2007) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006) were both highly formulaic, highly successful genre films—a thriller with an easy enemy, the corporate world, and a family dramedy with a road trip. But their characters and themes, so carefully crafted, lodged in our minds, in the space reserved for unsolvable problems and uncomfortable truths. New in Town can’t bear the thought of disappointing its audience; everything works out for everybody, no matter how improbable the odds and unlikely the choice. Disappointing, no?

Enough, you say. It is what it is—expensively-produced, cheaply consumed, disposable entertainment. Is it fair to criticize a product for being itself? No. It is not fair to fault New in Town for being a romantic comedy; it is only fair to fault it for a being a schmaltzy, sloppy, slapdash one. If only the writer/director of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, tried his hand at a romantic comedy, with witty repartee, and likeable leads, like Clive Owen and Julia Roberts.

It’s called Duplicity, and it arrives new in town in a few weeks.

One half of arts criticism is, of course, to evaluate the work of art, to appraise it and to place it in context, as the product of a specific person or culture, a specific place or time, or all of the above. If the original work is transplanted to another time, another place, or another culture, that job becomes doubly difficult. Such is the case with Colored Girls, running this week at the Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts—an adaptation by Trevor Nairne, local playwright and director, of a seminal 30-year-old choreopoem by American artist Ntozake Shange.

Paulette Williams grew up after World War II in racially segregated St Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a wealthy black Air Force surgeon. She was bussed to a white school, where she suffered. She married young, and suffered. She separated, suffered, and attempted suicide. She changed her name to Ntozake Shange, moved to New York, and staged a collection of her poetry called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. The play went on to Broadway and pushed Shange into the American spotlight as a leading black feminist voice.

So Colored Girls is a work of intense pain, the pain of living a life doubly disadvantaged—being black and female in America—without any crutches except those you fashion for yourself. Seven actresses, draped in bright cloths, deliver monologues describing domestic abuse, the loss of virginity (voluntary and involuntary), unwanted pregnancy—the whole litany of psychological scars is laid bare on the stage, as the women have their innocence and naiveté forcibly removed by the men they encounter. The poems are filled with beautiful, layered, deeply moving writing—the harsh cadences arrest the listener, punctuated by softer ones that caress the ear.

Unfortunately, Trevor Nairne and the students under his direction fail to give the writing its due. Shange’s poetry is packaged as confessionals taking place in a balm yard, a spiritual space intended, according to director’s notes, to “amplify the healing” of the women, but which has the opposite effect. Worse, the confessions are under the guidance of three “revivalists”, led by a man! This is a cardinal sin. Not only does it sully the sacred feminine space created on stage, but it robs the women of their agency, effectively undermining the raison d’être for the piece. The revivalists also lend a counter-productive farcical tinge to a criminally serious piece of theatre, with outbursts and reprimands played for humour.

When practicing monologues, actors often use a fellow actor as a dummy to motivate their lines. The male revivalist, who remains on stage throughout, may have been there in this capacity, to help the seven actresses-in-training. As it is, their performances were uneven, with standout turns by Joan Sappleton and Risanne Martin. Mostly, the students are hampered by the need to deliver a performance—acting with a capital A, they play emotions rather than characters. The School of Drama could use a big Stanislavskian kick in the assignments.

But the second half of arts criticism is being a curator for the public—guiding, through cogent and articulate opinion, what should or should not be experienced. Colored Girls is still a must-see show, a brave and provocative work, staged and acted by people committed to their craft. Despite missteps and mistakes, Mr Nairne and his students should be proud to provide a glorious, life-affirming breath of fresh air from the indistinguishable gaggle of ensemble comedies in the marketplace.

Susan Murphy has been hit with a big problem. After surviving a radioactive meteor strike, she finds herself fifty feet tall, captured by the military, living in a metal prison with bugs for friends, and tasked with defeating a killer robot. Fortunately, she’s a big-picture kind of gal. Her real problem comes when her fiance, an ambitious TV weatherman, tells her he doesn’t want to live under her enormous shadow.

The audience is meant to side with Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), but the studio behind Monsters vs Aliens probably feels great empathy for the self-involved reporter, Derek (Paul Rudd). After a decade spent making a dozen computer-animated films, Dreamworks Animation should be pretty tired of playing catch-up to the industry giant, Pixar.

Pixar is the Holy Reel—a film studio that consistently enjoys both critical and commercial success. The movie executives love the returns; the children love the characters; the critics love the sophistication. Critics are part of Dreamworks’ problem—every time they spit out a movie, we can’t resist the comparison.

But the studio invites the scrutiny by trying too hard to make Great Animated Movies that instantly enter the contemporary canon, like Pixar’s Toy Story (1995). Sometimes serendipitous timing or settings highlight their shortcomings, pitting their Antz against Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, or their forgettable Shark Tale against Pixar’s near-perfect Finding Nemo. And their most innovative film to date, 2001’s fractured fairy tale Shrek, has been spoilt by soggy sequels (with another, Shrek Goes Fourth, coming next year).

Monsters vs Aliens feels like more of the same—Pixar already did big, hairy creatures in Monsters, Inc. and provided the definitive animated action film with The Incredibles. Susan Murphy, or Ginormica, as she becomes known, is no Elastigirl. Admittedly, positive female protagonists are rare, and it is exciting to watch her sort out her life while saving it. But it is hard to embrace Susan for two reasons.

The first is her size, or more accurately, her proportions. Society is quite fond of supervising children, railing against the corrupting influence of everything from Movado to marijuana. But we apparently have no problem telling our little girls they should look like an anorexic 15-year-old all their lives. Susan is simultaneously sexualized and childlike—a combination that should cause nightmares for parents with girls.

The second is the fault of directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. Like boys in a sandbox, they are too anxious to destroy the city they had built (in this case, San Francisco, California), forgetting that we need to care about Susan along the way. Monsters vs Aliens is the first animated film made natively in 3-D (though we in Jamaica won’t get to see it) and the technology distracts the filmmakers. So we get mesmerizing shots of the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing into the sea, but they wash over us without much of an impact.

It’s tempting to think that Dreamworks will get it right next time. But with sequels to Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar and a Shrek spinoff in the pipeline, you’re better advised to wait a few months for the next gift from the benevolent gods of Pixar—Up, about an old man, a young boy, and a lot of balloons.

Eight years ago, The Fast and the Furious cobbled together Japanese automotive imports, the subculture of urban street racing, and two young, relatively unknown male leads into a surprise summer hit. In one weekend, the film recouped its budget and lifted Vin Diesel into stardom. Since then, two sequels have been made, with different bazaars, different cars, different stars—and different results at the box office. In Hollywood, making bad movies comes with the territory; making bad money does not.

Which explains the new, fourth installment in the franchise, Fast and Furious, which returns Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) to their original Los Angeles haunt, recapturing and even surpasssing the original film in danger and drama.

This is not to say that Fast and Furious lacks ludicrous moments (though, thankfully, this time it does lack Ludacris)—the opening sequence, set in a tropically-generic version of the Dominican Republic, includes fishtailing pickups and a CGI (computer-generated) escape from an enflamed runaway gas tanker. Nor does it avoid cheesy, forgettable and offensive dialogue— like multiple tired parallels between the curves of women and vehicles.

In fact, while the sex is modern (read: gratuitous girl-on-girl action), the film’s sexual politics are depressingly retrograde. Reveling in the misogyny of its cartoonishly muscular protagonists, Fast and Furious quickly establishes firm breasts and fan belts to be man’s playthings; the camera actually segments female bodies into their constituent parts for voyeuristic consumption. As a society, we want—almost demand—moralistic uplift from our leaders, but individually we are only too happy to sit in darkened rooms and stare at dancing derrieres. Jamaican women are denigrated enough without their husbands expecting to live out celluloid fantasies.

But beyond all that, beyond the silly lines and soft-core pornography, Fast and Furious succeeds. It succeeds by doing what Hollywood does best—sticking to a formula. Only it’s not Formula One. Fast and Furious is a Western in disguise—a souped-up, hyperkinetic Western, but a good Western nevertheless.

Vin Diesel’s Toretto rides into town, alone, after a long absence, with a score to settle and an unwavering determination to settle it. His past keeps chasing him (in the form of federal agents), forcing him to live life on the run, and extracting the ultimate price—losing someone he loved. Despite his experience, he is an outsider. The only tools at his disposal are his own skills and attributes—his physicality, his hands, his rough charm—and his trusted horsepower. Shane (1953), The Searchers (1956), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—there is no shortage of desert-backed films that share the same story kernel.

Unconvinced? Consider three more bits of evidence. During one chase, Toretto leaps from one car to another driving alongside him, in a new take on the old chestnut of switching horses. To pick up the trail of the man he seeks, Toretto studies a crash site. He bends down to the asphalt and rubs some residue between his fingers. Like any Western hero who knows his dirt, the residue points him in the right direction. And finally, the film contains an epic chase across the American-Mexican border desert, with Toretto and O’Connor (and even their names now seem to fit in the genre) pursued by a dozen or so men, riding in formation.

John Wayne might be spinning in his California grave, but only because Fast and Furious blew past it with a nitrous-oxide injection of speed, seduction and solid adventure.

There’s not much to say about 12 Rounds, which claims to be an action thriller but never gets around to producing any thrills, except for ending after only 108 minutes. John Cena, of American professional wrestling, stars as a beat cop who arrests a criminal mastermind by chance, and must save his girlfriend when the same terrorist kidnaps her a year later. The film was produced by WWE Studios, the movie arm of major wrestling outfit World Wrestling Entertainment, so the title, apart from referencing a plot point, is a clever way to rope in Cena’s longtime followers.

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than those followers enjoying 12 Rounds, which is as ordinary as a multimillion-dollar movie can get. In 1896, Frenchman Louis Lumiére set up his camera beside a railroad track. The resulting shot, of the arrival of a train, was so startling that some viewers screamed or moved away from the screen as they watched. Today’s moviegoing public is pumped so full of high-octane footage that we yawn as a fireball rips through an apartment building or as a luxury car does somersaults on the highway. Flying under an overpass becomes passé; driving on the sidewalk becomes pedestrian. Movie studios compensate with bigger explosions and more elaborate chases, seeking to shock us even as they jade us.

Thus we have films like 12 Rounds, which zooms from one action sequence to the next but leaves the plot behind. Cena and Aidan Gillen (HBO’s The Wire) have little to do except play good-cop/bad-guy; there’s no characterization to help texture their line readings. Without a compelling story or compelling leads, the promotional materials fall back on credentials—‘From the director of Die Hard 2 and the producer of Speed’. To be fair, 12 Rounds does borrow from both films—there is a cop running around trying to save his woman from the hands of a terrorist, and there is a bomb on a bus.

To be really fair, the film copies elements from every action blockbuster of the last twenty-five years, from Commando to The Fast and the Furious. But we shouldn’t fault it for failing to live up to its obligations any more than we should fault ourselves for neglecting ours. John Cena is only the latest in a century-strong battalion of Aryan supermen projected onto screens around the world. The United States has a narrow definition of hero, and it looks like Charlton Heston and Sylvestor Stallone and John Cena. It always has, and for the foreseeable future it will.

So be it. It is up to us to recognize that America maintains her power most directly, and with the greatest accuracy, not with smart bombs, but with dull hits like 12 Rounds. Because of her relentless propaganda, half our countrymen and women want to emigrate to Florida; they will be the ones enduring the midday sun tomorrow outside the American embassy in Liguanea. Standing in the sun, dreaming about a place only the movies can hallucinate—the land of the freeze-frame and the home of bravado.

Here’s a suggestion for the next action film you should see: Arrival of a Train by Louis Lumiére. It’s an oldie but a goodie.

12 Rounds
Directed by Renny Harlin.
With John Cena and Aidan Gillen.
108 minutes. Action.

The Gran Torino was an American sports car manufactured by Ford between 1972 and 1976, a long, low, wide vehicle with an aggressive grille and a large engine. It was a man’s man’s car—handsome without being conspicuous, powerful without being ostentatious. There was a gruffness about it, with a name that came from the Italian city equivalent to Detroit—Turin, or as the locals said, Torino. Today, the Gran Torino is a collector’s item, a relic, a well-crafted reminder of long-gone American automotive dominance.

Clint Eastwood, who you may have heard of, is an American actor who started out in the television western Rawhide exactly 50 years ago. He made his first fistful of dollars in a trilogy of Italian westerns portraying men with fast hands and few words. But his widest popularity came between 1971 and 1976, when he appeared in three films as Dirty Harry, a tough-and-ready cop with an aggressive streak and a large gun. He was the quintessential man’s man—strong-jawed but clean-shaven, with just enough wrinkles left in his suit and etched in his face. Today, he is a celebrated director, too old for action, a well-respected remainder of rapidly-diminishing American cultural dominance.

The comparison is invited because Eastwood’s new film, which feels for all the world like his last in front of the camera, is called Gran Torino. In it, the aged star is Walt Kowalski, a widower, a war veteran, and a psychologically wounded man. His two sons and their families have forgotten him, or try to forget him, or try to put him somewhere where they will be able to forget him. His combat duty was in Korea, the forgotten war, lost between the twin towers of World War II and Vietnam, although Walt is haunted by the atrocities he committed. He is bitter, scathing, deeply racist and desperately lonely. His only comforts are his dog and his mint-condition Gran Torino, which he helped make during his years at a Ford plant.

Oh, one last thing. He lives on a street filled with second-generation Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia.

What follows is both simple and complicated. It is yet another retread of white guilt: Walt, and Eastwood, standing in for middle-class middle America, must come to terms with past and current sins of prejudice and discrimination. In the fifties, Hollywood made what are known as problem pictures, which dealt with “the Negro problem”. Gran Torino, on one level, is just an updated problem picture, with ethnic substitution.

But after a half-century in the business, Clint Eastwood knows how to make a movie. And he is still a captivating screen presence, even though his smooth voice is almost vanished. Through his performance and his camera, we see an unflinching portrait of a man trying to make the right choices with the wrong tools. It is hard not to view Kowalski as the logical extension of Harry Callahan, as a commentary on the costs of false invincibility and stubborn self-reliance.

Eastwood has stripped his screen persona to its core—once again, with few words to say, but without any weapons to hold, in hands that have lost their dexterity and speed. What is left is a journey that stretches from the past to the present, from Korea to Michigan, from Rawhide to Unforgiven, a journey that ends in Gran Torino. Go take it for a spin.

Gran Torino (2008)
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
With Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her.
116 minutes. Drama.

Superheroes and superstars have three things in common—they enjoy the fickle, fleeting adoration of legions of fans, they are held to a higher moral standard than the rest of us, and they seem incapable of calling it quits. That’s why, when Bruce Wayne shuts down his basement Batcave in The Dark Knight, when Peter Parker tosses his latex in the garbage in Spider-Man 2, when Bob and Helen Parr are relegated to stultifying suburbia in The Incredibles, our sixth sense tingles—we know it’s a matter of time before the cape and cowl go back on.

That sense of anticipation runs through the first half of Watchmen, an ambitious, heavy-handed American dystopia set in an alternate 1985. Through an exquisitely-crafted early sequence, we see that America has decisively won the Vietnam conflict, Richard Nixon is still President, and that the Cold War is heating up. The US and USSR are watching each other with twitchy trigger-fingers on their nuclear arsenals. Masked vigilantes, once revered, have now been imprisoned, institutionalized or disbanded.

Lost in this grim world are the former Watchmen—Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). They are living inconspicuously, helping the government, prowling nighttime streets, watching their costumes gather dust. They are all dissatisfied, with their own lives and with the society they inhabit.

It’s a compelling setup, made all the more so by acute political and social commentary. Paranoia about nuclear war, communist sympathies and military supremacy are veiled swipes by the filmmakers at America’s current fears of a nuclear Third World, terrorist networks and asymmetric warfare. Disturbed by the human propensity for violence and destruction, Nite Owl asks a fellow hero, The Comedian, “What happened to the American dream?” The chilling reply: “It came true.”

But somewhere between the dirty streets of Manhattan and the barren surface of Mars, Watchmen loses its way. After smaller stories of pedophiliac murderers in New York and war criminals in Hanoi, suddenly the Watchmen are fighting in a faux pyramid in Antarctica to save the world from doom. It’s the curse of the blockbuster that pyrotechnics too often take priority over plot. The film’s pessimism ends up feeling pedestrian. Any group of caped crusaders can save the world. Yawn.

The more interesting questions are whether the world is worth saving, and from whom. Writers David Hayter and Alex Tse force us into philosophical difficulties, but then provide too-easy answers. In Watchmen, the threat to humanity is human antagonism; the threat to America is American aggression. These are not problems solved by a knockout punch, no matter how beautifully rendered.

The film is also overly long, at 163 minutes. Anticlimactic, moralizing speeches don’t make it feel any shorter. Director Jack Snyder and editor William Hoy should have shaved a half hour from the running time, leaving Mars and Antarctica on the cutting room floor. As Watchmen keeps reminding us, the world we’ve created is cold and unforgiving enough.

Watchmen
Directed by Jack Snyder.
With Billy Crudup, Carla Gugino and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
163 minutes. Action/Fantasy.

Let’s get some basics out of the way. The Spirit is based on a series of graphic novels created by Will Eisner in 1940, and brought to the big screen by Frank Miller. Eisner and Miller are two of the best-known names in the sequential art industry. Eisner is a legend and innovator, having elevated the comic book medium with unconventional stories of urban life and blight. Miller used to ink dark, psychological comic book sagas in the 1970s and 80s, wrote a couple of Robocop sequels in the 1990s and now, evidently in vogue in Hollywood, spends his time creating dark, unwatchable movies. He seems to be getting paid more for doing less the older he gets.

A graphic novel, by the way, is like a comic book, except it’s for grown-ups (which means kids read them). In a graphic novel, Veronica would come after Archie with a knife.

In The Spirit, a policeman, Denny Colt, who lives in a nameless, faceless American city, dies and is injected with a serum by his unscrupulous coroner. The serum gives him a second life with enhanced healing powers. He confides in his police commissioner and becomes a shadowy, masked appendage to the force known only as the Spirit.

The movie is bad. It is so bad, so overwhelmingly bad, that the rest of this space must be used to scare you away from it. The city the Spirit inhabits is an anachronistic mash-up of 1960s design and present-day technology—so the cars, trucks and planes look forty years old, all rivets and metal sheets, and the men wear fedoras, but they use sleek cell phones and the Internet. The Spirit displays inhuman acrobatics and physical resilience, yet comes close to death, yet voluntarily chooses to live on. All of this is incredibly disorienting, leaving the viewer confused about where, when and why events are taking place, and ignorant about the parameters of the world. Can the Spirit die? If so, how? Do we even care?

The movie’s awfulness, however, goes beyond its lack of coherence and therefore lack of drama. The Spirit is emblematic of so much that is wrong with our cultural landscape. It is one of a thousand pieces of entertainment detritus littering our minds. Or, to switch analogies, like a sausage—preprocessed, churned out of a factory, indistinct, artificially shaped, coloured and flavoured to look appealing, palatable in very small doses and sickening in excess.

The film euphemistically markets itself as ‘from the producers of 300 and Sin City’—in other words, the same rich guys who already cashed in on the marginal stylistic cleverness of Sin City are still trying the milk, and bilk, the public. Originality, today, is just a financial opportunity. It is seized upon, imitated, duplicated, replicated until even the original appears quotidian.

Why do we tolerate such a marketplace? Have we been so thoroughly trained by our television sets, car radios and magazines? Is our demand to be amused so insatiable that we voluntarily subject ourselves to the visual and auditory assault that is The Spirit and its ilk? Or are we still able, however dimly, to recognize that what is ‘out there’ is of our collective creation? For our own sake, our own spirit, one hopes so.

The Spirit
Directed by Frank Miller.
With Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes and Samuel L Jackson.
108 minutes. Action/Fantasy.