The Spirit - Verdict's in...

I don’t owe the fans a goddamn thing."

Frank Miller, interviewed in MAXIM magazine

I made no secret of my suspicions regarding Frank Miller's big-screen adaptation of 'The Spirit.'

I loved the original comic books - written and penned with wit and grit by the legendary Wil Eisner. The trailers I'd seen of Miller's film version, however, looked appalling - sharing nothing in common with the comic-book character I loved so much.

That's why I waited until The Spirit was released on DVD before I watched it.

Well, I've finally seen it - and it confirmed every fear I had.

Frank Miller's movie, slick and stylish as it was, turned out to be unmitigated trash from beginning to end.

It was a messy cinematic cocktail, combining his trademark Sin City cinematic style with a cliché-riddled script and a totally incomprehensible plot. There was simply nothing original - not one goddamn thing - about the whole dire movie.

Exotic dancers, swords and Nazis made some scenes reminiscent of 1967's Casino Royale spoof

But that's incidental to Miller's capital crime, of course. He adapted his 'Spirit' movie from the comic books of Wil Eisner - a legendary comic-book creator who inspired a generation of new artists (including Miller himself.)

The Spirit was groundbreaking because he was a regular joe - a man who fought crime with anonymity because his real-life alter ego had been declared dead. The Spirit didn't have any secret powers, hi-tech weapons or superhuman strengths. He could bleed, bruise and break just as easily as anybody else (and frequently did - several of Eisner's stories end with the Spirit in crutches or worse.)

Yet in Miller's film, The Spirit was an indestructible super-hero - injected with a chemical that allowed him super-strength and the ability to instantly heal his injuries.

The Spirit gets riddled by bullets, stabbed by scimitars and brained by a toilet - the only thing that gets broken is his tailor's heart.

By doing that, Frank Miller undercut everything compelling about the character. It rendered the whole movie pointless. There was no element of risk, no whiff of danger and nothing that remained from Eisner's original stories.

Considering that Frank Miller is such a legendary comic book artist in his own right, I found it incomprehensible that he would so enthusiastically slaughter this beloved comic-book icon.

What was even worse was the way he addressed concerns from avid Spirit fans. During the lead up to the movie's release, he arrogantly sneered that he didn't owe the Spirit's fans 'a goddamned thing.'

He made that clear enough with this movie - which is pretty much a ninety-minute middle-finger to everybody who loved Wil Eisner's incredible creation.

I suppose it's not an entirely wasted celluloid experience, though.

Raspy voice-overs aside, leading man Gabriel Macht actually fitted the role of The Spirit fairly well. He looked the part and lifted a few choice lines from the script to deliver with The Spirit's trademark optimism and charm. In a 'real' version of The Spirit stories, he'd have been pretty perfect for the part.

Gorgeous Eva Mendes, as The Spirit's long-lost love Sand Saref, is pretty much wasted. That being said, there's a single scene in which she wriggles out of a towel and the three-second flash of her round, ripe, naked bottom is probably worth the rental price of the DVD all by itself.

And finally, there's the lovely Sarah Paulson - playing alternative love-interest Ellen Dolan, the commissioner's daughter. She nails the best line of the movie - one that reminded me a lot of my days as a remorseless (but largely unsuccessful) womanizer!

"You're in love with every women you meet, Mr. Spirit. You say lovely things to all of us and you mean every word you say."

The film's too awful to have a saving grace, but if it did, it would be Sarah Paulson. Or Eva Mendes' bottom