I was sitting at my apartment today when I saw a tweet from none other than Warren Ellis which contained a link to a clip from Comic Con ’08 that contained a fight scene from the upcoming movie The Spirit. The fight was between our hero, The Spirit/Denny Colt, and the antagonist in the story: The Octopus. Played respectively by Gabriel Macht and Samuel L. Jackson, the fight was utterly outrageous; hundreds of punches, smashes with concrete blocks and toilets are all over the place. It’s completely hilarious. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but from the clip it seemed to be that way.

Now, I don’t know if this was how Will Eisner had originally written the series, or if any other writer, wrote the story in a “Oh my god, this is effing outrageous” type of way, but wow, this clip just made think: is Frank Miller making a comedy?

More ranting and the clip after the break.

So you see, this clip is crazy.

I have read some stuff about this comic and wasn’t sure how accepted it was going to be by the general public from the get-go. Obviously the style of the movie is very similar to Sin City–most likely the same CGI used in Sin City–and visually the movie is going to be stunning, but I think the story is going to be either too over the top, way to sleezy to be considered a good movie, or it’s going to blow my mind at how fucking incredible it is.

One of the original Spirit covers

Now, before you all go ape-shit on me for calling this movie before it’s made, I want to say that of all the trailers and previews I’ve seen, this movie looks like a series of near-sexual encounters from four or so women who just want to bang the hell out of The Spirit. Sure, Will Eisner originally wrote the comic to be this way back in the day (I mean the late 1940s needed some sex to make up for World War II!) but it looks like this movie may been all sex and no story with a cool fight thrown in. I’m just scared that it will be bad, but still sell the fuck out of the box offices.

Not to say I don’t enjoy extremely attractive women (Scarlett Johannson, Jaime King and Eva Mendes) crawling all over a movie screen, but I’m really hoping this movie will break my beliefs and be similar to Sin City where nudity and sexiness is used only to highlight the story.

That said, I know how Frank Miller is. I’ve read Sin City. I know. It’s all over the place, and whether or not the original The Spirit comics had lots of TnA, Frank Miller was going to throw some in just because he can. He’s a little hornball… but then again, if you had near-free-reign on a movie that casts such gorgeous women mentioned above, wouldn’t you make it as sexy and bad as you could? Man or woman, you have to admit you would.

A clip from The Spirit trailer showing some of the CGI

Good or not, I’ll be seeing this movie. Probably at midnight. I’ll let you know what’s up once I see it. Until then, I’m crossing my fingers for a good, if not great, movie from Frank Miller.