They can't be serious. "The Spirit" has to be a lampoon of hyperviolent, overdesigned pulp potboilers like "Sin City" and "300."
I suppose "The Spirit" could be worse, though it beggars the imagination to say just how. It's not easy to make a thriller that's both incredibly convoluted and intensely boring, laboriously narrated yet befuddled, but writer-director Frank Miller -- creator and co-director of "Sin City" -- mostly triumphs on all counts.
Based on a series of comics by Will Eisner, "The Spirit" stars Gabriel Macht as a masked crime fighter who likes to ogle dames, have fistfights and stand on tenement rooftops spouting tough-guy poetry about his city. An eye-rolling Samuel L. Jackson appears as the Spirit's opposite number, the Octopus, a mad scientist/crime lord with a penchant for samurai robes, Nazi uniforms and fun-fur pimp regalia.
The story line is just as gaudy, with reanimation, death spirits, insane medical experiments, cloned henchmen, elixirs from Mount Olympus and love gone wrong held together by threadbare wisecracks and criminal overacting. Photographed in moody chiaroscuro, the action feels two-dimensional, which is one-and-a-half better than the characters.
This film is PG-13 because 13 is the maximum age of those who might find it entertaining. If you must see this film, my advice is to crank your brain to its lowest possible idle and let the images wash over you.
• In wide release
Additional Information:'The Spirit'
Rated PG-13, for intense sequences of stylized violence, sexual content and brief nudity; (no stars)
