The Spirit

Strangely enough, I always thought Frank Miller admired and respected Will Eisner. In his introduction to Eisner/Miller, Miller calls the aging creator of the Spirit "my dear friend and honored colleague," then notes, "hell, the man was, and remains, one of my most precious idols." He calls Eisner "the Master." He admits that when he created Elektra, he "had no idea what intellectual property meant. So I ripped off my favorite cartoonist [Eisner]. Stole wholesale a plot from him from a story in The Spirit called 'Sand Saref.'"

That's good to know. Because if I didn't know that Miller adored the man, I might think this humiliation of Eisner's greatest creation was personal.

Frank Miller's The Spirit -- there is nothing of Eisner in this film -- is so awful, and so off-key, that it leaves the comics' fan somewhere between breathless and speechless. What is particularly painful is knowing that the moviegoers who have never met Eisner's Spirit will be forever saddled with the memory of Miller's ghastly incarnation.

The Spirit fails on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin.

The dialogue, written by Miller, is so wooden that it borders on parody or Adam West-camp. The characters are paper-thin and two-dimensional. And although The Spirit makes much of his love of the city ("She owns me body and soul. She is the love of my life. She is my city ... and I am her spirit"), we never see the metropolis Eisner brought to life in those Sunday comic supplements. All we get are Miller's blue screens and stupid pet tricks. I have never seen a movie that was so obviously staged in a 15 x 20-foot room and the effect is positively claustrophic.

Plot? I can't sum up the plot; the exercise would suggest we're supposed to take it seriously when Samuel L. Jackson dresses up as Joseph Goebbels. When Eva Mendes, as Sand Saref, says, "Shut up and bleed," or sits on the Xerox machine. When Scarlett Johansson jokes about being "eye candy." Will Eisner cranked out more plot every week for 12 years than Frank Miller generates here with red ties, white sneakers and that incessant snow fall (all the signatures in The Spirit are tired takes on Frank Miller, not fresh takes on Will Eisner). And Denny Colt speaks for all of us when he tells the Octopus, "Pardon me, is there a point to all of this? Because I'm getting old just listening to you."

The real Spirit, by Will Eisner

Watching Miller trash -- or is it mock? -- his idol's character reminds me why Alan Moore turns the other cheek when Hollywood worms parasitically into the heart of his work. And speaking of Moore: Remember what it's like watching Moore when he goes off on one of his riffs -- the obsession with the letter "V" in V for Vendetta comes to mind -- pulling a dozen more tricks from his bag just when you think he's run out of material, getting more creative as he goes along? In The Spirit, Jackson's has a series of cloned henchmen, each of whom has a name stamped on his chest. The first three are Logos, Ethos and Pathos, which is funny enough. But then comes Bozos and Dialos ... and Huevos and Rancheros ... and Adios and Amigos ...

This is what passes for cleverness when Miller is in the director's chair.

"At least die bravely ... rodent." And that's what passes for dialogue.

Frank Miller

You know what the worst of it is? A total of two actors don't share in the overall embarrassment of The Spirit, Sarah Paulson, who plays Ellen Dolan, and Seychelle Gabriel, who plays the young Sand Saref. In a flashback early in the movie, young Sand and young Denny Colt are found reading on the front steps of their tenement apartment. The comic in the boy's hands is Crime SuspenStories #20, the famous hanging cover from EC.

Yet I'm fairly sure the comic he's holding isn't the one published by EC; it's one of the reprints from East Coast, Russ Cochran or Gladstone. If you're a comics' guy, you notice that sort of thing. You notice that those in charge of this big-budget operation would know enough about comics to use this particular issue, just not care enough to track down an original copy of the book. And it occurs to you, given the rest of the damage you've just seen inflicted on the medium and Will Eisner's memory, that Miller may be laughing at you for noticing and