Comic geeks have worshipped at the alter of Frank Miller for years. He is, after all, the man that gave us Elektra, The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. Having been wildly successful at assisting Robert Rodriguez bring that last property to much critical acclaim, I suppose it was only a matter of time that Miller was to go solo, as it were, and take the reins of his own film. The question is: would a Frank Miller film be closer to his Sin City high or his Robocop sequel scripting lows?

Adapted from the Will Eisner comic of the same name, I can’t say exactly whether Miller does The Spirit justice. What it is though is a beautiful mess that seeks to duplicate Sin City’s breakthrough production design by combining CG backgrounds with real-life elements. The details though are where you get lost. Filled with hard-boiled dialogue and paper thin characters with confusing motivation, The Spirit proves that all that’s pulp works best on the printed page where lines like, “I’m going to kill you all kids of dead,” don’t jump out as artificially melodramatic.

The concept behind The Spirit is simple enough though. Young police officer Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) is killed in the line of duty, yet somehow still lives. He adapts the identity of the masked hero The Spirit to continue to fight evil, which primarily comes in the form of crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). The Octopus is looking for a way to make himself immortal, and has experimented on himself and The Spirit (whom he also killed) in order to achieve this goal. In this version though, the Octopus isn’t represented by an ubiquitous pair of white gloves, but is an over-the-top, scenery-chewing, too cartoony for cartoons super-villain that likes to play dress up.

The other big part of The Spirit is the hero’s struggles juggling all the women in his life, a laundry list of femme fatales that can’t decide whether they want to kiss him or kill him. Miller stacks the deck with Hollywood beauties like Eva Mendes, Scarlet Johansson and Paz Vega playing characters with names like Sand Serif, Silken Floss or Plaster of Paris. Combined with Sarah Paulson’s much more subdued Dr. Ellen Dolan, they’re all to some degree, head over feet for The Spirit, or at very least clinically obsessed with him like in the way that Johansson bats her artificially enhanced eyebrows.

I know Frank Miller’s been charged with misogyny before, but it seems like the only reason for these women to exist is to either act psycho or lust after the Spirit. What’s weird is that there’s plenty of built in drama already because Dr. Dolan is Denny Colt’s former fiancé. Which makes you wonder, just how chaste their relationship was if she doesn’t recognize him from repeatedly giving him medical treatment before a pre-hospital discharge make-out session. But ultimately the story comes down to two things: Samuel L. Jackson’s shameless mugging and the female characters using their sexuality to get their way whether it’s with the Spirit or not.

As for the story, what story? This is one of those movies where the plot is the MacGuffin, as in it’s a non-descript device whose point is never revealed and just simply exists as a device to get the film started. Its idea of dialogue comes down to the Octopus smashing a porcelain throne over the Spirit’s head and saying, “Come on! Toilets are always funny!” And as for any accusation that we, the “critical elite,” simply misunderstand the intent of the film, I say, it’s not the lack of faithfulness to the comic we decry, but a lack of focus, coherence and direction that at least had me sitting there staring in disbelief.

Unfortunately, The Spirit can’t even be put in the so bad, it’s good category because it really is smartly and professionally made. I have a feeling that for Frank Miller this was an indulgence project where in it’s a pre-existing property that he could take and do what he does best, in the filmmaking style he’s already familiar with. It’s not to say that Miller is a poor director, but his Spirit deserved better than being Sin City 2 complete with long soliloquies about how the city is a damaged woman needing saving.