The Spirit

It is impossible to review Frank Miller’s botched comic-book adaptation The Spirit without re-reviewing Sin City, his 2005 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez. Although Will Eisner’s original 1940 comic The Spirit (about an immortal masked man who fights crime in a seedy metropolis) influenced comic-book style, Miller shoves the material into a PG-13 version of the Sin City mold—CGI backdrops, flashes of cartoon color, comic-book panel images, and beautiful bodies (most notably Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, and Gabriel Macht as the Spirit) shot in silhouette. But where Sin City was a thrilling head trip of color, motion and orgiastic violence, The Spirit is dramatically inert and boring. Most scenes amount to hammy performers reciting jokey noir dialogue in a bare room.