Review: Spawn (1997)

Let’s go back to the nineties again for a bit. This was a decade that, culturally, you could largely divide between happy sunshine dayglo doing the Macarena and edgy black-clad leather-obsessed HEAD LIKE A HOLE BLACK AS YOUR SOUL brooding. Take a guess which category today’s subject falls into!

Spawn was one of many, many obsessively grim and uber-violent comic book characters to emerge in this decade, created by a guy called Todd McFarlane, who these days largely produces action figures for thirty-somethings. Here is the backstory he came up with, as far as I can comprehend—CIA chief Wynn stubbed his toe once or something and, naturally, thus decides to destroy the world. So, he engineers the death of assassin Al Simmons in a pact with demon lords from hell, who have decided that Simmons will make an ideal general for their army because…er…he had a really good LinkedIn match I guess. So, reborn as Spawn, Simmons goes around being less than pleasant to ne’er do wells while being harangued by a demonic clown, who is also a stick insect looking thing. Also, Heaven gets involved, with their own champion who may or may not be also a robot, or a robot scorpion, and blah blah blah blah blah.

You may have guessed that I never really got into these comics. Still, they were quite big in their time, with there even being a stylish HBO animated adaptation I’ve heard decent things about, and as befitting a grotesque violent antihero obsessed with hooks, you even had lunchboxes for kids and all that. This all lead into a film adaptation in 1997, starring Michael Jai White as the titular character—this, incidentally, predates Black Panther by a lot as a feature with a black superhero, but it still being the nineties, they just had to make him a literal demon creature.

We get off to an amazing start with an opening sequence that makes the credits unreadable, flashing them up with epilepsy-inducing jittering and flashing. Good luck trying to see who the director of photography or whoever is, because, for some reason, it feels like nobody involves wants you to be able to find out. They do make sure to leave McFarlane’s name up there for a good few moments, as if to be absolutely sure someone else can be blamed for what’s about to happen.

The first few minutes make it absolutely clear what caliber of writing we’re in for. We start off with Martin Sheen as Wynn, playing him like an absolute lunatic (so like Charlie Sheen, in other words). When in the first five minutes we have such lines as him literally going ‘bwahaha’, it becomes most apparent just what you should expect, so I guess that’s something to be appreciated. Anyway, he hatches a plan to kill off Al Simmons as part of some hellish pact—and Simmons, meanwhile, is just starting to cotton on that his boss, who has pictures of nuclear explosions on his wall, may not be entirely sane or stable. Of course, after being asked pretty please to do one last job, he soon gets killed by way of gasoline in the stupidest manner possible, and from here on out, poor Michael will spend the rest of the film caked in makeup that makes his face look like it’s made of McDonalds bacon strips. 

Turns out you can in fact pinpoint the precise second where Michael realized what had happened to his career. 

The movie has so little faith in either the script or the audience that it periodically throws in narration to explain what exactly is going on and what the emotional states are, because we all know you should tell and maybe show only once in a while. “And so Al Simmons decided to return home. He had just been incinerated in an explosion, and that wasn’t a very nice experience. So he decided to try and crash on the couch with Sex & The City boxsets…“

But we’re only just getting started. It’s not long after that we’re introduced to the Clown character, played by John Leguizamo. You may or may not remember him from such things like the Mario Brothers Movie, or The Pest, and if you do, my condolences. His performance here is what turns the film from being merely incredibly stupid into excruciating—picture, if you will, that one schlemiel you get at every party, who never ever shuts up for a single second, and thinks his Borat impression is so avant-garde and daring that he needs to repeat it at least four or five times to make sure we get it. You might then have just barely a vague inkling of how aggravating this is, and the film simply refuses to go five minutes without him, just to be sure that this is the main thing you remember. 

If you hate this character just by looking at him, then good. It means you're still smarter than the people who made this.

We do get the other memorable aspect of this film at around the same time, however. We’re shown just what happens when Simmons gets sucked into hell, which looks like a PlayStation 1 cutscene on a very exotic kind of mushroom. For some reason, there are thousands of other Spawns standing around disco-dancing very vigorously. And then we get introduced to this movie’s version of the Devil (Sorry, it’s ‘Malbolgia' or something, but there’s really no difference plot wise). And good god…pfffff….pffffahhahahahahahha!

"And lo, did Dante enter the stupidest circle of Hell. And yea, from that moment was he lost, for then he looked upon this burnt chihuahua thing, and died thereafter of hysterics." 

You know how someone compare this kind of CG to the N64 or something? Usually they exaggerate, but no kidding, this really does look like a video game render of the time that’s decided that any concept of ‘effort’ is simply too bourgeois! I mean…I feel like fainting from laughter just thinking about it! And instead of animating any jaw movement, they just stretch out his mouth to convey only the vaguest sensation of talking! And at the same time, he’s ranting about how Spawn will ‘die’ if he doesn’t obey even though not two minutes ago they made it very clear he’s already dead! Because…he’s going to be even more dead now I guess! He was only just a little bit dead beforehand, y’see. 

This is where the movie peaks, because there’s very little worthwhile after this, not that you were watching fine cinema to begin with. Most of it is taken up by Spawn largely being useless at anything, until a heaven-sent knight teaches him to actually use his powers in a scene that feels like an informercial (“Your armor contains 1.5 trillion connections! Yours for only three monthly payments!”). Sheen continues to act like he’s off his meds, and Leguizamo continues to try and kill your faith in humanity. 

The final fight in hell is quite literally unwatchable, just being this barrage of indecipherable CG flashing that is attempting to murder every brain cell you may have left, and even for the time that’s no mean feat for a mainstream film. There is precisely one interesting scene where Spawn has to accept that he must move from his beloved wife, and the implication that maybe Heaven aren't so holy themselves, but the movie has far more important things to focus on, like complete nonsense. 

Even the soundtrack is lame--we have both Prodigy and Crystal Method, two groups I actually like, collaborating on a song that proves...completely forgettable. And the ending song is some nonsense about "I wanna live but I wanna die, I love you but I hate you, I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet, mwehh mewhh mwehh'--who wrote this? Oh, Marilyn Manson, go figure, he's best sticking to instrumentals in my book. There's why I never did get into the whole emo metal scene to be honest!

It occurs to me that this film itself may very well be an instrument of damnation, just because of the sins it’ll inspire in you. You’ll definitely be feeling Wrath, because it goes out of its way to piss you off, even if you otherwise have the disposition of an angel. Envy also, because you’ll be very jealous of anyone who hasn’t had to sit through it. And then Pride too, because you’ll feel very enamoured with yourself knowing that even with a head injury and a cheap half-broken camcorder, you too could make a more coherent picture! 

So there you have it. Spawn is a film so bad, your soul will be bound for hell just watching it. I…do not recommend this unless you have at least one other person to share the agony with. And you know what’s even more hilarious? This wasn’t even the most infamous comic book movie of ’97—but we’ll get to that one in good time…