Spawn

At its best, Spawn offers genuinely eye-catching visual effects for its title character, a slain government assassin returned from the dead on a mission of vengeance. At its worst, it provides the kind of horrid acting often excused in genre films as "campy," a vision of hell-as-Sony PlayStation game, and a script which fails to give the main character a life before it gives him an afterlife. Most of the time, however, Spawn is merely redundant, recycling the gloom-soaked heroism, perpetually rainy alleys and Gothic spires of a dozen other recent films inspired by comic book characters. Even John Leguizamo's amusing performance as the demonic Clown is simply a scatological gloss on Nicholson's Joker from Batman. Comic book adaptations took on an edgy vibe when the source material became known as "graphic novels," but the invigorating first wave has given way to endless imitators. Fans of Todd McFarlane's Spawn comics have already seen this film on the big screen. Everyone else has already seen it in another film, when it was called Batman, or The Crow, or Batman Returns, or The Crow 2, or... Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)