"The Spirit" is a loony, embarrassing mess that takes the late Will Eisner's classic comics creation and beats it senseless with a giant toilet bowl (literally, at one point).
The film is the solo directorial debut of another comics legend, Frank Miller. I love Miller's older graphic novels, including 1986's "The Dark Knight Returns" and 1991's "Sin City." His last significant comics work is the decade-old "300," adapted to film last year. He co-directed the "Sin City" movie with Robert Rodriguez. I weep for fans of those movies, because they're about to learn something readers of Miller's comics have known for a while: At some point in the late '90s, Miller stopped telling dense, ambitious stories, and his art became fixated on a tiny set of over-the-top visual fetishes -- including swastikas, Converse sneakers, dinosaurs and the fannies of lethal women in dominatrix garb.
This makes him an ill match for the pioneering Eisner, who created "The Spirit" in 1940 as a weekly newspaper insert and used the title character -- a masked, undead vigilante in a suit and fedora -- to play with the language of comics storytelling. And sure enough, Miller (who's in way over his head as a filmmaker) ignores Eisner's legacy in a way that feels almost hostile, instead writing and directing a story that's convoluted and campy while wallowing in Miller's above-listed visual fetishes -- fetishes he already digested far more skillfully with Rodriguez.
Miller should be paying homage. Instead, he repeats himself.
The movie is a septic tank of vapid noir posturing, bad narration, bizarre pacing, cartoonishly hot femme fatales and ineptly staged slapstick -- in which The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) squares off against an ex-girlfriend turned jewel thief (Eva Mendes) and an eyeshadow- and Nazi-uniform-wearing villain named The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) over some supernatural treasure.
There's not enough newsprint to document the endless, cover-your-face, can-I-get-a-refund foolishness that ensues. Miller gives George Lucas a run for his money in making Jackson and the rest of the cast (including Scarlett Johansson) look like dinner-theater thespians floundering in a world of green-screened art direction. I'll just describe two scenes, likely missing from Eisner's source comics -- one in which Mendes calls someone a "perfect a**" while Xeroxing her perfect fanny, followed by another in which The Spirit uses the resulting photocopy as a suspect photo, which he shows to assorted doormen until one of them recognizes it.
Imagine 90 endless minutes of that sort of puerility, and worse. Try not to imagine that future Pixar directors Brad Bird and John Lasseter nearly made their own "Spirit" feature in the '80s, because that would only depress you. Eisner is probably spinning in his grave with enough force to burrow to the Earth's core. _____
D-minus; 102 minutes; rated PG-13 for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity.
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