Spawn

An adaptation of the Todd McFarlane comic, directed by Mark Dippé. Al Simmons serves as a Marine intelligence colonel and covert operative, and his superior Jason Wynn sends him to a chemical weapons plant in North Korea. Wynn sends an assassin after him, and Simmons burns to death. In Hell he is offered a bargain: he returns to Earth and sees his fiancée Wanda again, and in exchange he agrees to lead Hell's army in the war to come. Simmons accepts and comes back as a disfigured being in living armour, five years late — Wanda has married his best friend and is raising a daughter. The film moves its hero between two mentors: the clown demon Violator pushes him towards revenge and the leadership he promised, while the old man Cogliostro — another envoy of Hell, one who managed to free his own soul — teaches him to wield the armour and holds him back from killing. Wynn meanwhile deals in biological weapons and has a device implanted in his heart that will release the plague worldwide if that heart stops. The ending brings Simmons to refuse the bargain and to choose the defence of other lives over revenge. Michael Jai White took the lead, and the film became one of the first in which a Black actor played a major comic-book hero. John Leguizamo, Martin Sheen and Theresa Randle played beside him; the role of Cogliostro was Nicol Williamson's last on screen. The director came from computer graphics, and the hero's living cape together with the landscapes of Hell were built as the film's central attraction. Graeme Revell wrote the score, and the soundtrack songs were recorded in pairs, each teaming a rock band with an electronic musician. The film opened in the United States on 1 August 1997 and took about 88 million dollars against a budget of 40 to 45 million. Critics received it coldly — they praised the look of Spawn and faulted the script along with the villain's make-up — and among readers of the comic it has remained a cult picture.