'The Spirit' moves from comics to farce

Gabriel Macht stars as the title character in ''The Spirit.'' (Lionsgate/odd lot entertainment)

It must really hurt to kill the thing you love.

"The Spirit" was always for connoisseurs and cultists. Created by the late, great Will Eisner in 1940, it may have been the first auteur comic book, unbeholden to DC or Marvel and written with a literate wit that owed equal amounts to film noir and Eisner's Jewish New York roots. Imagine "Spider-Man" written by a tougher, more soulful Jules Feiffer (who, in fact, was Eisner's assistant early on) and you're halfway there.

Frank Miller, of course, is the very model of a modern comics auteur: the writer-illustrator who retooled "Batman" into "The Dark Knight" in the 1980s and created the dark, anarchic "Sin City" in the 1990s. He directed the film version of "Sin City" in 2005 - a blast of vicious pulp energy - and now has brought one of his acknowledged influences to the screen. If anyone could honor "The Spirit," it should be Miller.

Enough history; how's the movie? In a word: dispiriting. Taking the same visual approach to this material that he did to "Sin City" - tilted comic-panel angles, intentionally cartoonish action, images desaturated of color except for one key element (like yellow police tape or the hero's red necktie) - 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.

Gabriel Macht plays the barely masked hero - a former Central City cop mysteriously brought back from the dead to fight crime - and he at least understands that the Spirit's a Bogart figure with supernatural touches. The film's villain - in more ways than one - is Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus, an egg-obsessed criminal mastermind bent on achieving immortality. Jackson's performance is one for the record books: He screams, he preens, he schpritzes, and when all else fails, he repeats his lines over and over. Over and over. Over and over.

At least he's trying. (Really trying.) As two of the many wasp-waisted femmes fatales who alternately swoon for the Spirit and try to kill him, Eva Mendes (as Sand Saref) and Scarlett Johansson (as Silken Floss; the names are Eisner's inventions) have no clue how to get on the comic book's mordant/serious/goofy wavelength. Accordingly, they simply shut down. Both actresses are lovely to look at and actively painful to hear.

A vase of Hercules' blood and long-lost Argonaut treasure figure into the plot, but just barely. Miller is aiming for pure style - another man's style at that - and it's just too idiosyncratic to translate across mediums. (There's a reason a "Spirit" movie was never made while Eisner was alive; a 1987 TV pilot never took off.) The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin. They don't mind committing hara-kiri on command. Well before "The Spirit" gives up the ghost, neither will you.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.