Reviews

As a long-time comics fan I recall this little, inoffensive, unchallenging Reb Brown late-70s pilot-shot of the star-spangled superhero.

Any TV-flick where the hero is menaced by a thug bearing a silenced **revolver** can't be taken seriously, especially in a Rocky-inspired knock-off meat-locker scene where the side of beef strikes back. (And I don't mean, the actor Brown.) Come to think of it, the sides of beef almost out-act Brown, who otherwise comes across as a likable-enough person.

When I was a teen, before my own military career, I missed such absurdities as a Marine quoting from a statue's inscription at West Point, instead of Annapolis, although the idea of a civilian helicopter cavalierly invading the air-space over a military classified-weapons testing installation had me guffawing 37 years ago as did the idea that a two-week separated Marine could grow that full a head of hair that Steve Rogers sported at the beginning of the film.

For continuity sake, in the Marvel comics at the time, Steve Rogers was traveling around the country as an artist.

For fans of banality, this is one of the 70s best examples: a nearly actionless action feature in a time of America's cultural nadir when the likes of "BJ and the Bear" with its upshifting rigs reflected the sort of faux excitement trickled out to mind-numbed viewers.

A C- for California Comics Casual, with an A for aesthetics for both Heather Menzies for the guys and, I suppose, Reb Brown for the ladies.

After reading a score of bewildered IMDb user reviews, I realize that most of the people expected something in the brutal vein of "Sin City" or "300", as if they all sat in for a screening of Brando's "Teahouse of the August Moon" and suddenly leaped to their collective feet en masse exclaiming, "This isn't Bruce Lee's 'Enter the Dragon'! This isn't Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai'!"

Nor is Frank Miller's paean to Will Eisner a parody or sendup as many confusedly carped because it's breathtakingly faithful to, pun intended, the spirit of Eisner's creation. It's supposed to be funny, people! The exaggeration -- tossing in the kitchen sink -- echoes the source material.

In thousands of comic panels, the late Denny Colt was knifed, gunshot, bludgeoned, tossed from buildings, dragged through sewers, and betrayed by femme fatales who nevertheless fell in some measure to his boyish, indefatigable charm, even if they were clonking him on the head.

Miller had his hands full trying to distill all those decades of The Spirit's adventures -- and those beautiful women! -- into one story.

Some compromises had to be met. Samuel L. Jackson's reasonably restrained performance (compared to the portrayal in the comics), of the conflated character of Dr. Cobra (the villain who in the books administered the life-prolonging serum to the late Denny Colt) and the Octopus seems outrageous to the novice viewer who never read the series. Likewise the series' characters of P'Gell and Sand Saref are combined in the film.

The Spirit's boyish gallantry comes off as cavalier womanizing when so many of the important women in his life are crammed into one story. Though the script treats Ellen Dolan mostly as a doormat, the arc of Denny and Sand's star-crossed love is treated more tenderly.

Louis Lombardi delivers one hilarious line after another as the dim-bulb, eager-to-please, irrepressibly-positive clone set as he himself manifests a hybrid avatar of Stooge Curly Howard and William Bendix.

Visually, this film is one of the most stunningly rendered cinematographic pieces I've encountered even if the task required muting the elaborateness of Eisner's surrealistic cityscapes. At first, as a purist, I cringed at Miller's choice of **sneakers** as Our Hero's chosen footwear, yet found the choice arresting in the Rotoscope scenes where they enhanced following the shadowy figure through the snowy night.

There are other problems of artistic choice of which Miller cannot be as readily absolved.

Faced with the requisite compression of seven decades of noir and comedy, Miller veered The Spirit's character more toward dark harshness than the lightheartedness and optimism one associates with the character. More a rendering of Miller's Dark Knight Returned than of the plucky Boy-Scout Wonder, Central City's guardian growls more often than whistles.

Still -- fun romp, Frank.

Shame that so many walked into the wrong movie.

If I'm remembering this episode correctly, I flipped my lid when Ed Asner in a rerun of these episodes begins citing the amount of his pension in exactly the terms that Hackman did in the Kris Kristofferson flick "Cisco Pike" after I had viewed the latter film and realized not only that sequence but nearly the entire plot had been adapted for the show.

I had never seen so a clear-cut case of "wholly lifted" in my young life until the series "AlieNation" ripped off Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett tension-ratcheting "Maybe. He. Won't. Even. Twitch." shooting scene.

Regardless, this is one of the best episodes of "Mod Squad". Asner's terrific as the veteran, highly-decorated cop on the verge of retirement. But go rent "Cisco Pike" to see what I mean.

My only confusion is to which came first, since both were produced contemporaneously.