Film

He’s a man whose superhuman skills and speed made lesser mortals tremble, and whose name is uttered with awe. They called him…Will Eisner. A writer and artist who helped revolutionize comic books (there’s a reason the industry’s top award is called the Eisner), he built his reputation with The Spirit, a 1940s newspaper insert in which former criminologist Denny Colt slugged bad guys and wooed leggy dames with yuk-yuk tags like Sans Seref. Colt wasn’t a superhero per se; just a guy with a suit, a mask and a yen for fighting crime.

It’s no surprise that the formal inventiveness and flat-out genius of Eisner’s baby would get lost in screen translation. Still, director–comic icon–Eisner acolyte Frank Miller has belched up a skewed adaptation of his mentor’s series that, even by Hollywood standards, manages to be woefully oversensationalized and shockingly inert. Per the source material, the Spirit (Macht) punches and flirts; femmes fatales Seref (Mendes) and Silken Floss (Johansson) exploit their va-va-voom wiles; and criminal mastermind the Octopus (Jackson) acts baroquely villainous.

But starting with the use of the chiaroscuro template of his Sin City books and movie (which he codirected), Miller systematically reduces Eisner’s urban heroics to noirish less-than-nothings. Every line is hardboiled to rigor mortis—this sort of pulpy dialogue was never meant to be uttered by humans—and for a man who makes his living telling stories visually, Miller has no idea how to turn images into living, breathing cinema. Even those who aren’t funny-book fanatics will recognize this as anti-entertainment; there’s little Spirit here, literally or otherwise.