Spawn - Arrow Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) is an assassin for the United States government. Though he kills for a living, he’s growing disillusioned with his work. Just short of growing a conscience and leaving the life behind him, shortly after a job with unexpected collateral damage, he’s killed by his employer. Simmons doesn’t go peacefully into the sky with a harp and a halo; he shoots down into the fiery depths of Hell, where killers go. It doesn’t matter that he thought he was the good guy. He did bad things in his life, and he must pay for his sins.

Malebolgia, one of the rulers of Hell (I guess if Satan is CEO, this guy would be middle management), offers Simmons a bargain: If Simmons leads the army of Hell, he can come to earth and see his wife. Deals with the devil are known for being duplicitous and tricky, so Simmons does get his wish, but it’s a terrible one. Five years have passed, and his wife is with another man—Simmons’s old partner at the CIA. Twisted, burned, confused, and angry, Simmons is but a tool for the demons of Hell to exact their carnage on the world. Now a hellspawn, Simmons is taken on a violent path by the demonic Violator (an unrecognizable John Leguizamo under prosthetics and makeup).

Spawn is… a mess. Both tonally and technically, it’s all over the place. For every element that the movie gets right, it fumbles and drops ten more things. Guillermo Navarro’s cinematography is great, as always, and he inherently understands the language of comic books to convey information visually. And the practical effects, like Spawn’s suit or Violator’s makeup, are top-tier work from KNB EFX Group. But when the movie switches gears to visual effects, it’s grotesque. The CGI is shockingly bad, even for 1997, which is especially surprising given director Mark A.Z. Dippé’s bona fides as a visual effects supervisor on groundbreaking films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. The sequences set in Hell look like the cutscenes from the PS1 game.

I remembered this movie being a lot cooler when I was eleven years old. Right around the time it came out was when I was gobbling up some of the darker, more mature comic book antiheroes like Spawn, Venom, or The Punisher. I’m willing to look the other way on bad special effects if the story is good. For that matter, if the spectacle is absorbing enough, it can forgive a lot if the story falls short. But they can’t both be terrible. It’s one or the other. Spawn’s ultimate sin is in wasting a perfectly good villain, played by Melinda Clarke. She’s set up to be quite the rival for Spawn and is unceremoniously dispatched in the first act.

None of the villains have much of a chance to shine in this, John Leguizamo being the sole exception, who’s having enough fun for ten villains. Martin Sheen, who’s generally a good actor, is completely wasted. The climax even forgets he’s there. He’s leaned against a wall, making a shocked face for about ten minutes. Michael Jai White does his best in the title role of Spawn, but he’s stuck with a plot that doesn’t do much with his physical and spiritual torment, being a tool manipulated by evil forces in both life and death.

Spawn is largely terrible. Some movies are terrible in a fun way, where you’re able to turn your brain off and allow the visuals to wash over you as you forget your troubles for an hour and a half. But some movies don’t even succeed at the modest task of being brainless entertainment. It’s so bad, it causes you to think even more! There’s an art to inconsequential entertainment that Spawn doesn’t seem to understand.

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Spawn is reborn from the fires of hell into a two-disc release, containing both the original theatrical cut and a slightly extended R-rated director’s cut on each respective 4K UHD Blu-ray disc. Arrow Video’s release houses the two discs in a standard case featuring reversible cover art and a removable slipcover. Inside the case are an illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by John Torrani, and a double-sided foldout poster featuring two original artwork options.

Spawn is presented in 4K from a new scan of its original camera negative by Arrow, for both cuts of the film. Aside from those segments that look like they take place in a 1997 video game like MDK, Spawn looks spectacular. Guillermo Navarro is one of the best cinematographers in the biz, and he lenses the film with an appropriate gloominess, engulfed in moody shadows and aggrandized camera angles that make the hellish world feel larger than life. The Dolby Vision HDR grading allows colors and highlights to pop amid those shadows. Fine details, like the attention given to Spawn’s costuming, are crystal clear in 4K. And while the entirety of the film is rendered sharply, there’s a subtle layer of film grain throughout, giving this a look very faithful to its original theatrical release.

On the sound front, Spawn soars like a bat out of Hell. For all my complaints about the story and lousy visual effects, I’ve got none with it comes to the sound design. Spawn is available in a 5.1 surround option encoded in DTS-HD MA, and a 2.0 LPCM stereo option, but if you’ve got a proper surround setup, there’s no reason not to take full advantage of it. Surround sound activity is at a constant level, whether through ambient effects like rain or the tormented souls in Hades wailing in pain. As a child of the '90s, I have a certain nostalgic love for the scene when Spawn explores his new life as a soldier of Hell, as Marilyn Manson’s badass song “Long Road Out of Hell” plays.

Arrow has assembled some great new features for its release of Spawn, and has also carried over informative legacy features like archival featurettes and audio commentary. All supplements are found on the first disc, for the R-rated director’s cut, which runs a couple of minutes longer for added shots of violence and mayhem.

• Brand New Audio Commentary - Comic book expert and podcast host Dave Baxter
• Archival Audio Commentary - Todd McFarlane, Mark A.Z. Dippé, Clint Goldman, and Steve Williams
• Hell's Perfect Son (HD 16:20) - Brand new interview with actor Michael Jai White
• Spawn Support (HD 16:48) - Brand new interview with actors Melinda Clarke and D.B. Sweeney
• The Devil's in the Details (HD 20:14) - Brand new interview with animatronic creature and special makeup effects artists Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero
• The Devil's Music (HD 10:24) - Brand new interview with music supervisor Happy Walters
• Order Out of Chaos (HD 16:42) - Brand new interview with editor Michael Knue
• Todd McFarlane: Chapter & Verse (SD 19:37) - Archival featurette from 1998
• The Making of Spawn (SD 21:58) - Archival behind-the-scenes featurette
• Trailers
• Scene-to-Storyboard Comparisons
• Original Todd McFarlane Sketches
• Spawn Concept and Sketch Gallery

Whether or not Spawn is any good is irrelevant. Movies like this are enjoyed on levels beyond stodgy metrics of quality. You either vibe with its violent, gothic camp, or you don’t. You’ll either see its special effects as laughably terrible, or you’ll think it adds to its '90s charm, like its title sequence, a vortex of flames and jumpy credits, which may be the '90s-est thing ever created. If you’re a fan of Spawn, you’re going to love this release. The A/V stats are stellar. It looks and sounds awesome. And the special features that have been assembled are going to keep you busy for hours. Spawn on 4K UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video is Recommended.