generationofswine
This hurt. Spawn was a really cool character, well, he still is. He was a character for the 90s and...it was really the 90s that killed this movie.It tried really hard to look like the Crow, which was also an unbelievably 90s film, but one that worked well with the look that certain movies in the decade had.Spawn just didn't. It wasn't really suited, it didn't really match and the result was a big...meh.But the thing is, now they are remaking it and...Spawn as a character doesn't really fit today very well either.There is a time and a place for Spawn, and, like Maxx it was the 90s and MTV, but not the big screen and not today either.
Sam Panico
There was a time when comic books were not celebrated. When only the disenfranchised cared or knew about them instead of the mainstream. And in those ancient times — let's call them 1992 — no news was bigger than when Marvel's biggest creators left en masse to form Image Comics. At the time, these artists were derided as style over substance. Many of them weren't known for hitting their deadlines. Or even how to draw feet properly. But one of them — Todd McFarlane — took the opportunities that his new home presented and made the most of them, creating his signature character: Spawn.Spawn is everything that McFarlane loved to draw: a muscular hero covered in spandex, chains and a cape that seems to be way longer than it should be. It was an instant hit, giving birth to a toyline, an HBO animated series (which still holds up) and finally, this movie.Al Simmons (Michael Jai White, playing one of the first African-American superhero to be a movie lead, as this movie and Shaw's Steel came out at the same time) is a black ops soldier assigned to a mission to investigate a North Korean biochemical weapons site. But he's been set up by his boss, Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen) and is killed by Jessica Priest, Wynn's new top assassin. After being set on fire, he winds up in Hell, where Malebolgia offers him a deal. If Simmons will lead his armies to Heaven's gate, he can see his true love, Wanda, one more time.You know how those deals with demons work. They're rarely fair. When he returns to Earth, Simmons learns that Wanda is now married to his best friend Terry(D.B. Sweeney, Fire in the Sky, The Cutting Edge), who is raising his daughter, Cyan.Malebolgia sends one of his demons, Violator (John Leguizamo), to mentor Simmons. But there's also Cogliostro (Nicol Williamson, The Exorcist III), who also sold his soul to become a Hellspawn but who has found his way to Heaven.Meanwhile, Simmons becomes Spawn and attacks Wynn, now a powerful arms dealer. He easily defeats his killer, Jessica, and escapes an attack by an army of mercenaries thanks to his new powers.Violator — who either appears as a clown or an Alien-esque demon — gets Wynn to add a device to his heart that will release Heat 16, a biochemical superweapon, if he dies. Malebolgia wants Simmons to kill Wynn and start the end of the world. But Violator has his own agenda and nearly kills our hero before Cagliostro saves him. As he learns how to use his powers just as he also learns that Wynn plans on killing everyone he loves.What follows is a battle on our earth and in Hell, where Spawn denies his contract with the Devil, bests Violator and returns to our reality, ready for the sequel which never came.Spawn is very of its time, a film packed with early CGI (nearly half of its effects were unfinished until two weeks before it was released) and a soundtrack that mixes techno with hard rock and metal (the Atari Teenage Riot/Slayer mashup "No Remorse" is a highlight). It's a decent enough film but is a sanitized version of the chaos inside every panel of the Spawn comic. It just feels like something is missing. There's no real heart in the film, nor any real threat to our hero.After years of talk of a sequel, McFarlane announced a new Spawn adaptation in 2015, with the goal of the creator writing the script and directing. In July of this year, it was confirmed that this was true, with the film being produced by Blumhouse. Here's hoping for something great.Read more at http://bit.ly/2APIBVE
tomimt
If you read comics in the 1990's a good change is that you were introduced to Spawn, a series that tried to be more darker end edgy than what DC and Marvel comics were offering at the time by having the villains and heroes that came from heaven and hell, being angels and demons. It was a comic, that for a while, made me stop reading DC and Marvel altogether.Of course this new found glory of a different kind of heroes and villains was adopted on screen as well, thus an utterly mediocre and very, very poorly aged schlock of a movie called "Spawn", where everyone grunts and growls their lines and evil people are more evil than Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.The best things about "Spawn" is the suit of Spawn, which is pretty source accurate and John Leguizamo as vile, disgusting and nasty demon clown clown. I'd love to add Martin Sheen as a good thing, but alas his character is so clichéd in all the evilness, that you can't look at him without laughing.The plot of Spawn is pretty simple. Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) is an A6 agent, who takes care of bad people by killing them. He's double crossed and he goes to hell, in where he does a deal with a devil and gets back on Earth as Spawn. A revenge ensues, and perhaps even some forced character growth and annoying kids as side characters. Que end fight and half veiled promises/threats of sequels.The movie itself isn't rocket science, but action movies really don't need to. What jumps out though is the very poorly aged CGI effects all around. I recall the movie looking less than stellar the year it came out, but today it looks like someone forgot to press a render button before some of the effects were cut in the movie. Also most of the action is pretty poorly shot and the end result is just not that entertaining.As such Spawn could have been made to a good movie, but in the end this just wasn't it.
