The Spirit (2008)

Frank Miller's The Spirit arrives from 2008 with the confidence of a man who believes he has reinvented the moving image, and with the reviews to suggest otherwise. Gabriel Macht plays Denny Colt, a cop killed on the job and returned as a masked guardian of Central City, and the film surrounds him with a digital backlot of green fog and rain-slicked rooftops. Samuel L. Jackson, as the Octopus, wears a different costume in nearly every scene, including a samurai robe and a Nazi uniform, a decision the film makes without apparent irony. Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Paz Vega, and Jaime King fill out the femmes fatales, each styled for the poster and given little else to do.

The casting is notably multiracial for a comic adaptation of its era, with Jackson, Mendes, Vega, and Stana Katic in prominent roles. The film never comments on this. Race is not a subject here, and neither is anything else resembling a social thesis. The women are assembled as objects of the hero's bottomless appetite, and the screenplay treats this as charm. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revision. The Octopus commits crimes for immortality and amusement. Central City's corruption is a backdrop, not an argument.

The film offers instead Frank Miller's second pass at his own Sin City template, thinner and stranger. It lectures no one. It has no message beyond the pleasures of a long coat and a well-placed shadow. For a viewer assembling a taxonomy of contemporary cultural signaling, this is barren ground, and the classification is swift. The picture is a stylized neo-noir action fantasy that failed at the box office and earned its critical drubbing on craft, not ideology. We file it under spectacle and move along, mildly relieved that nothing here demands our agreement.