The Spirit (2008)

It’s weird to write about a comic book superhero movie from an era when comic book blockbusters weren’t a thing.
Sure, we’ve had decades of Superman and Batman movies, and the X-Men and Spider-Man got some turn-of-the-century love, but short of big-name heroes that even non-nerds would recognize, putting your comic book on the silver screen was by no means a guarantee of box office success.
That said: I have no idea if “The Spirit” (2008) was even close to a box office success, but it did come before the advent of the current MCU/DCCU duel, and thus was absolutely a shot in the dark, and that takes a certain leap of faith.

“The Spirit” also isn’t a traditional comic book movie. Instead, it’s a noir detective story that happens to include a superhero and a supervillain. Compared past noir-themed movies I’ve reviewed, this one actually got it right.

The movie was filmed in black, white, and red, or sepia tones, with the color blue only showing up as one woman’s shirt and one man’s eyes, and yellow appearing twice, both for explosions. Everything else was perfectly color-toned to match the genre.

For the black/white/red scenes, they filmed the shot, then animated over it to only show the shapes of people against a white background, with a few red highlights. It was a very cool way to frame the landscape or single characters, especially as there was narrative dialogue.

Unfortunately, the creative team kept switching between that and the sepia filter, which wouldn’t have been terrible, but they would switch styles during a scene and that became distracting.

The narrator/protagonist, The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), was a man who woke up one day with amnesia and an inability to die. He decided that it was his role to protect Central City from crime, both mundane and super. Sand Saref (Eva Mendez) was a morally ambiguous femme fatale with motives that on only benefited her, out to find the shiniest and most expensive jewels the world had to offer, which ultimately brought her to Central City, as the villain happened to have the piece de resistance to Saref’s collection. Silken Floss (Scarlet Johansson) was the right-hand-woman to the villain; she added some entertaining dialogue, but was otherwise relatively unimportant to the story.
And finally: Samuel L. Jackson played The Octopus, a completely bonkers surgeon-gone-mad with the possibility of mastering immortality, and willing to go to any length to get it. It was a cooky, goofy role that was a far cry from the terminally-serious Agent Fury we’ve come to expect from him in the Marvel movies.

Some scenes showed a young Sand Saref played by Seychelles Gabrielle. This was an outstanding pick by the casting department - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-CGI younger/older cast combo where the actors actually looked like they were the same person. Kudos for making that pick.

As I’ve ranted about many times before, quippy dialogue doesn’t work: it leaves scenes feeling stunted and discombobulated, like the actors are reading two different scripts.
However: this time, they got it right! 
Because noir detective radio shows relied on it, and this movie was very true to form to the genre, and clearly because director Frank Miller paid attention to the source material, the quippy conversations here actually flowed and fit thematically and didn’t leave me frustrated at the characters on screen.
Another thing that matched the source material: scene transitions actually looked like they came from a comic book. It’s hard to describe in writing, but if you’ve ever seen a fight scene dictated by panels on a page, that’s what they did here, but in film form.

Unfortunately, the music wasn’t great. There were a couple generic ‘heroic’ bits to the soundtrack, but nothing consistent and nothing flowing.

Alas, they didn’t have Garrison Keillor narrate anything here, which is a shame, as his Guy Noir character from “Prairie Home Companion” would have been quite at home in Central City.

It’s clear that most of the movie was filmed in front of a green-screen, a la “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004), neither of which have aged well. Between the age of this flick and the inevitable march of CGI advancements, most scenes looked... not great. The perspective would be off, or someone’s shadow wouldn’t fall correctly, or it just looked wrong. Like the uncanny valley for an actual valley. 
Potentially, if you weren’t paying attention, this wouldn’t be noticeable, but I was, so it was.

I originally saw this movie in theaters a decade ago when I was a teen. I thought it was absolutely outstanding then.
With time and a refined eye, it’s a bit less outstanding - the script was kinda cheesy, the special effects weren’t great, and it does miss the mark on a few other ‘great movie’ requirements. 
But: as a noir detective radio show turned into a movie, it was very good.
If you can get your hands on a copy to watch, it’s worth the time.