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The Spirit Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity) Genre: Action Theater release: December 25, 2008 by Lionsgate Directed by: Frank Miller Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes Cast: Gabriel Macht (The Spirit), Eva Mendes (Sand Saref), Samuel L. Jackson (Octopus), Sarah Paulson (Ellen Dolan), Dan Lauria (Commissioner Dolan) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Will Eisner and Frank Miller: two great tastes that taste awful together?

A couple of decades ago, maybe. In the late 1980s, when comic-book giant Miller's groundbreaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was rocking the world of comic book fandom, I had the privilege as a cartooning student of studying under the legendary Eisner, creator of the seminal The Spirit series. In those days, there were no greater luminaries in my pantheon of cartooning heroes—The Spirit was Citizen Kane, The Dark Knight Returns was The Godfather—even though Eisner didn't share the Miller love, and could be merciless to a cartooning student who submitted pages displaying a Miller influence (as I learned the hard way).

But the lousy taste of Miller's solo directing debut The Spirit isn't simply a collision of conflicting aesthetic visions. The lousiness is all Miller's—and it's been evident in his own comic-book work for some time now, which has increasingly degenerated into debased self-parody.

Gabriel Macht as The Spirit

Miller reinvigorated comics in the 1980s with an approach influenced by film noir and martial-arts cinema, among other things. Over time, though, that aesthetic metastasized into the increasingly stereotyped, sadistic and/or sleazy worlds of Hard Boiled, 300, Sin City, and dreadful sequel/prequel extensions of his classic Dark Knight Returns.

These days, everything Miller touches becomes an extension of the Frank Miller Universe, a dark, gritty, rain-soaked, blood-drenched, camp satire of a film noir world populated with one-dimensional character types—musclebound toughs, brutal villains, exotic whores, venal authority figures, lethal femmes fatales—who speak in tough-talking clichés, have rough sex and kill and die in heinous ways, bereft of human interest but high in visual impact.

The Spirit is a straightforward excursion into the Frank Miller Universe at its most reductionist, self-parodying and content-free. There are no characters or relationships, only placeholders where characters ought to be. There is no drama or conflict, only dueling line readings and cartoony brutality. There is nothing at stake and nothing and no one to care about, only a pointless, shapeless exercise in wildly veering moods and styles.

Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus

As reimagined by Miller, the Spirit (Gabriel Macht, The Recruit) is such a soulless cipher, he lacks even the self-awareness to realize that he doesn't know who he is or why he does what he does. Why he wears a mask and fights crime; why he seems to be in love with any woman in his field of vision, only to forget her as soon as she's out of sight; why he mysteriously recovers from any number of fatal injuries just like his more self-aware archrival, the villainous Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson in a twist on Shyamalan's Unbreakable, where he played an abnormally fragile counterpoint to the indestructible hero).

The movie provides an explanation for the Spirit's (and Octopus's) invulnerability; as for the Spirit's crimefighting, perhaps that doesn't really need an explanation (Eisner himself never bothered to invest his protagonist with a psychologically compelling motivation, like Batman or Spider-Man). The thing with women, though, is just plain weird.

Perhaps it's simply that women in the Frank Miller Universe are basically interchangeable bombshells with a few basic profiles: whore/moll, psycho killer, good girl. I'm reminded of a line from a very different movie that also fundamentally subverted its title character: "There is only one woman in the world, with different faces."

Eva Mendes as Sand Saref

Said faces here include Officer Morgenstern (Stana Katic), a bright rookie with a schoolgirl crush on the Spirit; Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), a murderous exotic dancer who both loves and hates the Spirit; Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), an Octopus henchwench whose attitude toward the Spirit I can't remember to save my life (gosh, this movie is fading fast). More importantly, there's Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), the Spirit's tragic childhood flame, now a femme fatale with a soft spot for cops stemming from the murder of her own hero-cop father. (The conspicuously repeated term "Electra complex" obviously recalls the Elektra that Miller created as Daredevil's lover-turned-enemy—but the Serif character in Eisner really does have that soft spot and that history.)

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