Writing in the Will Eisner Listserv on Yahoo! Groups [eisner-l], Tom “The Comics Savant” Stewart points us to a second negative review of the Las Vegas sneak preview of Frank Miller’s “Will Eisner’s The Spirit” on Ain’t It Cool News.com. As of this morning, this review had an astonishing 175 comments:
By “VoicesOffCamera”:
I just got back from an advanced screening of “The Spirit” here in Vegas. According to the people hosting the screening, we were the first audience to ever view the film, and that the eventual theatrical release would have some changes.
Now, I’m a fan of the Spirit comics and Frank Miller (Born Again is easily one of my top 5 comics of all-time), so I was intrigued to see if Miller was going to pull this off. If he did this as a comic, I’d expect the modern way over-the-top Miller that we’ve been getting on All-Star Batman, but would that be how he’d portray his friend’s character on the big screen, for people who have never even heard of The Spirit before?
The answer is that the picture he made is closer to the movie “Shoot ‘em Up” than anything Miller or Eisner have done before (That means no “I’m the Goddamn Spirit”).
The violence is very over the top and cartoony in a Looney Toons style. The first fight, for instance, which takes place after an extended version of the “City is my Mother and Lover” roof-jumping scene we’ve all seen in the trailer, consists of Spirit and the Octopus beating the crap out of each other in a pond by pulling all sorts of weapons and blunt objects out of the water and bashing each other with them.
