The Spirit

Rating:

*

Verdict:

The worst superhero movie of the year ... well, so far.

Yeah well, you'd expect it to look a treat. After all, this is influential comics guru Frank Miller directing a film adapted from work by Will Eisner, the supposed father of the graphic novel.

While Miller's film record is a little spotty - he co-directed his own

Sin City

- he was also the guy whose Dark Knight reinvention of Batman inspired both the Tim Burton era and the recent incarnation of Bruce Wayne's alter ego.

So you would think he would be good with masked superheroes like The Spirit, who first turned up in the funny pages in the 1940s. After all, plenty of other directors have done awful things to Miller's other comic-book characters on the big screen.

Well, fancy that. Here Miller takes a seemingly immortal superhero and delivers him stone dead. It sure does look like a comic book and a really dense, speech-heavy, metaphysically mind-numbing, pulp noir one at that. Oh it does try to be funny. Mainly with frequent superhero in-jokes - I was awake for the ones about Robin and Elektra, there were probably others.

It certainly photographs the film's conveyor belt of bitchy vamps (Mendes, Johansson and more), with Miller's lens permanently on the setting "hubba-hubba" which should get him a few perfume ads now this film thing doesn't seem to be working for him.

Of the actors, at least Samuel L. Jackson as villain the Octopus knows he's in a truly looney toon and scores another one for his bizarre career showreel with a particularly gruesome mad scientist scene in which he turns up - for reasons unexplained - in a SS uniform.

But those are fleeting distractions. While The Spirit leaps from roof to roof, the film limps from frame to frame, seemingly oblivious for the need to tell a coherent story. It doesn't help that Miller - possibly confused by not having his characters limited to speech bubbles - can't seem to let a single scene finish unless everyone present gets a line in, however stupid.

Yes it's amazing what they can do with that green-screen technology which allows the likes of The Spirit's imaginary noir world to be rendered around the actors. But here's yet more proof the overall effect can be less than special. It's dispiriting, this Spirit thing.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Samuel L. Jackson, Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson

Director:

Frank Miller

Rating:

M (violence)

Running time:

102 mins

Screening:

SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley, Rialto