{"id":8658,"date":"2012-05-06T02:19:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T06:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/?p=8658"},"modified":"2012-05-06T02:21:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T06:21:13","slug":"minimate-mini-review-53-the-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/2012\/05\/minimate-mini-review-53-the-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Minimate Mini-Review #53 - The Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

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#53 - The Spirit<\/h3>\n

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The story of a rookie cop returned from the dead to patrol the city he once protected, The Spirit explores the grey areas between good and evil like never before! Featuring The Spirit, Sand Saref, Silken Floss and the mysterious Octopus, add this set to your collection before it vanishes into the night!<\/i><\/p>\n

That bio applies to the whole box set, not just the Spirit himself (which you can probably tell, since it describes the movie and not any of the characters). Sadly, these figures are based on Frank Miller's terrible movie, not the comics, so instead of wearing blue, he's dressed all in black. The only details are the silver belt buckle and grey paint for his shoes and shirt pockets. His coat is a new piece, and his tie is separate, which may be one of the coolest Minimate costume pieces ever!<\/p>\n

You can remove his hat, and there's replacement hair to go with it. There's absolutely no evidence of actor Gabriel Macht in the Spirit's face, and the eyes are too large for the head. The fact that he's got black hair, black hat, black mask, black coat, black shirt, black pants, black gloves and black shoes should tell you how incredibly boring this figure is.<\/p>\n

Eva Mendes was supposed to get a Minimate in the cancelled Series 15, which would have been a Ghost Rider<\/i>-themed bunch, but that obviously didn't happen. So here we have her as Sand Saref - or at least, Sand Saref cosplaying as Jakita Wagner. Seriously, in the comics Sand Saref looks like this<\/a> and like this<\/a> - and for the movie, Frank Miller just stole his ideas from Planetary<\/i><\/a>. The figure is gloss black, with red piping on her suit and a few simple lines to create wrinkles. They certainly didn't skip any apps on her cleavage, then drew attention to it through the use of a golden necklace. Her likeness is decent, though it's helped by the haircut and the mole on her cheek.<\/p>\n

Of the many, many, many<\/b> mistakes made in the creation of the movie, one of the worst was showing The Octopus. The entire point<\/b> of the character is that he's never seen<\/a>! He's like Inspector Gadget's Dr. Claw: sometimes you'd see his hand, but that was it. In fact, The Octopus's only visually identifiable trait is that he wears gloves with three stripes on the back (which this Minimate does, so points for that at least). Sam Jackson would have been a great choice to play Octopus, if he'd been willing to pull a Hugo Weaving<\/a> and keep his ass off-camera the entire time. With his coat covered in tentacle patterns, his funky fur hat and his purple eye makeup, this figure is an excellent representation of something that never should have been.<\/p>\n

The Octopus is the only figure in this set to come with any weapons. He gets his \"Darrow\" assault rifles, which were named after artist Geof Darrow and his propensity to draw highly detailed, multi-barreled guns. Technically these two accessories combined would only form one \"complete\" Darrow from the film: the props were built from two M4 carbines, an M11, an H&K UMP and a SPAS 12 shotgun; the Minimate version splits that in half, so one gun gets a carbine and a shotgun, and the other has a carbine and an M11. It makes sense, because to do the full thing would have been madness (and the figure never could have held them up), but if you must<\/b> have screen-accurate guns, you can make your own with a few drops of glue.<\/p>\n

Our final figure is the Octopus' henchwoman, Silken Floss. She was played in the film by Scarlett Johansson, which means the Spirit himself is the only person in this set who hasn't been in more than one comic movie<\/a>. Proudly carrying on the movie's tradition of being visually dull and repetitive, Silk is wearing black. Now, the nurse costume in the film was decently sexy, but a flat block figure just can't duplicate Scarlett's decidedly not-flat figure. It falls to the skirt to give us even a suggestion of hips, but her chest is still a rectangle, so she looks bottom-heavy. Frumpy. The face is really good, with recognizable eyes behind those catseye glasses, and her hair is a unique piece.<\/p>\n

The Spirit<\/i> was just a steaming poop-pile of a movie. It's worse than Batman & Robin<\/i>. Hell, it's worse than Howard the Duck<\/i>! The Spirit<\/i> did for comicbook movies what Battlefield Earth<\/i> did for sci-fi: gave the entire genre a new bottom floor to always be better than. It's cinematic rectal cancer. If you want to see a good Spirit movie, go watch Dick Tracy<\/i> again - the main character's name might not be Denny Colt, but they got everything else right without even trying. There were plans to release a set of comic-based Spirit Minimates<\/a>, but the shitacular movie and these unimpressive movie 'mates torpedoed any chance of that happening. So not only is Frank Miller responsible for us getting bad toys, he's also responsible for us not<\/b> getting good toys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

#53 - The Spirit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,137],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-8658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-asylum","category-mmmr","tag-minimates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8658"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8666,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8658\/revisions\/8666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}