Seriously?

It’s hard to know what to make of The Spirit, what director Frank Miller — a comic book writer (Sin City) directing his first film on his own — wanted us to take away from it. Is it camp? It’s certainly not trying to be serious, with lines like “I’m gonna kill you all sorts of dead” and Samuel L. Jackson overacting more than I’ve ever seen Samuel L. Jackson overact, if that’s possible. Or is it?

It comes across like a parody of itself, except it also seems to be trying to be a parody of itself. If that means I’m too dim to get what Miller was going for, so be it, but my guess is, Miller didn’t really have a clear vision, either. There’s a lot of ideas in here he probably thought were really neat, and some of them are, but there’s no consistent tone, and the plot is pretty trite.

The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) used to be a rookie cop named Denny Colt, was killed on duty, but mysteriously came back to life and decided to start fighting crime as a vigilante. We only find that out about halfway through — the movie starts with the Spirit already in action, fighting his nemesis, the insane Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson).

They have a big fight scene early on that consists of them kicking the crap out of each other in the mud. In reality, no one could sustain as much damage as they do, but we later find out it’s because they’re both imbued with a serum that basically prevents them from getting hurt. So where’s the stakes? In the climax, the Octopus keeps on shooting the Spirit with a wide array of guns, knowing full well the Spirit’s just going to keep coming.

The novelty here, I guess, is the existence of a lot of female roles — usually an afterthought in comic books. That’s great, but on the other hand, it’s still pretty obvious that Miller’s views of women haven’t changed much since he was fourteen years old. This is the guy who made every single female character in Sin City a prostitute or a stripper. (Oh yeah, and a lesbian parole officer who walks around naked.)

The women fare slightly better here in that some of them actually have real professions, like Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), a girl-next-door nurse, and Morgenstern (Stana Katic), a rookie cop. But then there’s Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) a mysterious jewel thief whose chief trait is that she