FRANK Miller on the big screen is like Scratchy or wasabi or a bass player – he doesn’t work on his own. He needs a partner, or some diluting ingredients, or maybe a restraining order.
Miller, the comic-book visionary behind “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” and “Sin City,” makes his big-screen debut as solo writer-director with an adaptation of Will Eis-
ner’s “The Spirit,” and I really wish he hadn’t. With its starkly contrasted visuals (fierce blacks, Clorox whites, a dash of unholy crimson), “The Spirit” may resemble a comic book more than any live-action film yet made, but it makes “Max Payne” look like a gleaming jewel of storytelling by comparison.
And Samuel L. Jackson as “the Octopus”? That oughta be enough for a movie right there. Pimped out in a sombrero, this grinning miscreant faces off with the Spirit – the shade of a crusading dead cop played by a chesty but uninteresting actor named Gabriel Macht – from the beginning of the film.
Since Miller doesn’t bother to build up these two characters or explain their beef or what’s at stake, their fights are less comic-booky than cartoonish. It’s hard to get too involved when the baddie clocks the Spirit with a toilet, since the Spirit doesn’t seem to mind. When you think you’ve seen everything but the kitchen sink, one of those comes flying past, too.
The Spirit (tailoring of Zorro, healing properties of the Terminator), prowls Central City, a playground of cops and sinners that throbs with injustice and corny dialogue. The not-quite-noir, not-quite-camp one-liners are neither funny nor frightening (“Shut up and bleed,” “I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead”).
Together with the immensely stylized visual design, the effect isn’t hyper-real but hyper-phony. Central City is a town where everything is cool and nothing matters. Although at times he is called to the next world by the underwater temptress Lorelei (Jamie King), the Spirit stands fast as a soldier of the streetlights, getting treated by a gorgeous doctor (Sarah Paulson), trading quips with his boss (Dan Lauria, the dad from “The Wonder Years”) and remembering his childhood sweetheart turned jewel thief, Sand Saref (Eva Mendes).
The Octopus, meanwhile, with the assistance of his own girl, Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson, looking like a librarian-dominatrix), and his gang of hapless henchmen (all played by the same guy, a cross between an oompa loompa and Don Rickles), seeks the power surge that will come if he ever finds a vase containing “the blood of Heracles.” (Says the Spirit, “I thought it was Hercules.”) What does Heracles/Hercules have to do with the mean streets of a cruel city? Don’t ask.
The constant pull – between old and modern (everything looks like the 1940s, but there are cellphones), romantic and lecherous, po-faced and absurd – means the film can never even settle on a consistent mood, giving it a frantic, distracted air that good looks can’t overcome. As the Octopus puts it after firing about 50 fruitless shots at his rival, “There’s shot to hell, shot to heaven and just plain ridiculous.”
THE SPIRIT
10-cent comic.
Running time: 108 minutes. Rated PG-13 (action violence, sexual content, brief nudity). At the Kips Bay, the Union Square, the 84th Street, others.