The Spirit: Critic Reviews

Full of burnt-end romance and 'style,' but robotic at its core.

What is most striking about The Spirit is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to by sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once.

Frank Miller's adaptation of the antique comic strip by Will Eisner is brash, noisy and so alarmingly ill-paced that it should, by rights, come with a software package that allows viewers to recut it as they see fit.

The Spirit is uneven, but its campy adventure provides some amusing, escapist fun.

Good comic books suggest action through abstraction, but The Spirit plays like an overproduced diorama.

Miller turns The Spirit into a hambone farce. Worse, by hiring well-known actors and indulging their worst impulses, he destroys the tart irony Eisner built into every frame.

Miller, comics-writing icon turned director, has rendered comics-industry revolutionary Will Eisner's crime fighter Denny Colt a grim shade of dull -- all talk, no action

The incomprehensible plot has something to do with a stolen elixir of eternal life. But that's beside the point, since all the director cares about is the film's noirish look and pulp fiction feel.

There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

Frank Miller wrote and directed this adaptation, in a visual style lazily close to that of his Sin City. Full Review » 4 years ago