Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
Rookie cop Denny Colt returns from the beyond as The Spirit, a hero whose mission is to fight against the bad forces from the shadows of Central City. The Octopus, who kills anyone unfortunate enough to see his face, has other plans:g to wipe out the entire city.
Frank Miller's solo directorial debut adapting Will Eisner's classic comic is a visually ambitious but narratively incoherent mess. The hyper-stylized Sin City-esque black-and-white-with-color-accents cinematography is striking in places, giving it some visual distinctiveness, and the neo-noir aesthetic at least feels committed to a vision. However, the plot is scattered and poorly structured, lurching between tonal extremes without coherence. The acting ranges from hammy to outright bizarre — Samuel L. Jackson's cartoonish Octopus and Scarlett Johansson's flat performance drag things down, while Gabriel Macht struggles with thin material. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying, failing to deliver on even the modest dramatic stakes it sets up. The film's novelty lies in its extreme stylization and its oddball sensibility, but it ultimately feels more like an imitation of Sin City than a genuinely distinctive work in its own right.