Spawn Blu-ray Review

Spawn Blu-ray ReviewIf there’s a bright side to the disjointed, sloppy mess that was 1997’s Spawn, the big-screen adaptation of the Todd McFarlane comic book, it’s that it was a necessary step to get to the superhero film renaissance of today.

But oh my GOD is it a painful step.


Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) is a covert assassin working for a super-secret section of the U.S. government who wants to get out of the murder business. His boss, Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen) has other ideas. Having struck a deal with the demonic Clown (John Leguizamo), Wynn sets Simmons up to be killed so that he can be sent to hell and recruited to become Spawn, the general of Hell’s eventual assault on the gates of Heaven.

Upon his return to Earth, five years later, Simmons tries to make reconnections to his previous life but sees that his beloved wife Wanda (Theresa Randle) has married his best friend Terry Fitzgerald (D.B. Sweeney). With nothing left to lose, the newly-forged Spawn is forced to choose to follow the guidance of the Clown or to heed the wisdom of Cogliostro (Nicol Williamson), a centuries-old warrior who has stood vigilant, waiting for the forces of Hell to make their move.

It’s a busy plot, and it’s one that could have worked – but not in 98 minutes. Character development is rushed (when it’s paid any attention at all), important story points are glossed-over with one-line blurbs of exposition, and blatantly-obvious elements are repeated ad nausea. In short, it’s a mess.

One of the biggest problems is with the treatment of the title character. In the film, Spawn is faced with the reality that, in order to move forward with his new powers and identity, he must let go of his old human self. As Cogliostro tells him, “Al Simmons is dead. Let him go.” It’s an interesting idea, and one that – again, with more time – could have been an effective one. And it’s an unusual choice for a “superhero” to have to make. In order to save humanity, he must willingly give up his humanity.

The problem, however, is that we never really got to know Al Simmons as a person. The movie tries to backtrack this obvious flaw with intermittent flashbacks to Simmons’s old life, but we’re left without anything to connect to. If we don’t care about our main character’s inner conflict, then we don’t care about him – and if we don’t care about our main character, we don’t care if he succeeds or not.

In terms of the movie’s performances, the actors are clearly trying, but the blueprint for a successful comic book movie hadn’t been drawn yet – the actors knew what they had to do but were left without a template to tell them how. Martin Sheen (Uncle Ben in this summer’s The Amazing Spider-Man) is a great actor, but the character of Wynn is written as such a mustache-twirler that he has no choice but to blatantly chew the scenery.

John Leguizamo is painfully annoying in his performance as the Clown, and even though he’s a negligibly-talented actor in the first place, he does try to infuse it with some sense of fun. But he doesn’t have anything to work with besides fart gags and gross-out jokes.

Then there’s the visual effects. I tried to give the flick a get-out-of-jail-free card on this one, but even for 1997, these special effects are shoddy at best. Sci-Fi Channel original movies at the time had visuals that were on-par with the work Industrial Light & Magic did for Spawn.

At the end of the day, Spawn is a cheesy film both in conception and in execution, and there’s nothing for an audience to connect to. At every turn there are opportunities to develop the characters and to enrich the story, but they’re incessantly squandered.

High-Def Presentation

New Line Cinema brings Spawn to Blu-ray with a 1080p AVC-encoded transfer that is generally faithful to the source. Many shots are rife with grain, but this is also a 15-year-old movie and one that was a low-budget flick at the time, so most visual distractions have more to do with the print than anything else. The colors (particularly Spawn’s CGI cape) are extremely vibrant, definition is right on the money, and it’s a visually satisfying experience, independent of the god-awful visual effects.

The soundtrack, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, is also up to the challenge. The action scenes are wonderfully balanced, with the primary bursts of sound coming through the center speakers with the after-effects and ambiance fed through the rear and sides. It’s an audibly-immersive experience that transcends the horrible movie it accompanies.

Beyond the Feature

All special features have been ported over from the 1998 DVD release, highlighted by a series of interviews with creator Todd McFarlane, entitled Todd McFarlane: Chapter & Verse, where McFarlane discusses his feelings on the source vs. adaptation debacle (more pertinent now than it was at the time of its recording) and some thoughts on the process of creating the character and the Spawn universe.

The other major attraction is the audio commentary with director Mark Dippe, visual effects supervisor Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, producer Clint Goldman and McFarlane himself. McFarlane is recorded separately (always an annoyance for me), but generally the commentary is informative, and its participants are engaging enough to keep an audience’s interest.

The other bonus features are as follows:

  • The Making of Spawn
  • Scene-to-Storyboard Comparisons
  • Original Todd McFarlane Sketches
  • Spawn Concept/Sketch Galleries
  • Todd McFarlane’s Spawn: The Animated Movie Preview
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Music Videos: Filter & The Crystal Method, ‘Trip Like I do’; Marilyn Manson & Sneaker Pimps, ‘Long Hard Road Out of Hell’

Spawn is a lacking movie, especially compared with modern-day comic book masterpieces like Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and The Avengers. Unfortunately, it was born of an era where, frankly, Hollywood simply didn’t know what to do with superhero films (not coincidentally, it was released the same year as Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin).

It’s a film full of mistakes that were necessary to get to where we find ourselves today, where superhero movies are a viable and respected genre unto themselves. But none of that changes the fact that Spawn is an incoherent mess of a movie.

Shop for Spawn on Blu-ray for a discounted price at Amazon.com (July 10, 2012 release date).

Spawn Blu-ray Review

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