Based on all the bad things people had said about it, when I got The Spirit from Netflix, I watched it with low expectations.

Sadly, the movie couldn't even meet those...

There are several problems here: the disjointed pacing, the too-dark lighting, the incoherent scripting, the mediocre acting... It's just really poor, and not even poor in a good or fun way, just a sort-of stare-at-the-screen-and-go-"buh???" way.

This isn't the worst use of Samuel L. Jackson -- George Lucas's utter inability to make Mace Windu interesting will always have that place of honor -- but it's right down there. Jackson's at his best in two modes: utter, frightening calm or manic insanity. Sometimes he does both, viz. Jules in Pulp Fiction. Miller managed to find a weird middle ground that was too manic for Jackson's calm mode but too calm for his manic mode.

The dark palette was especially unfortunate. What worked for Sin City doesn't really work for The Spirit. For all the noir trappings of the comics, Eisner's art was always fairly bright. Muting the colors didn't do the movie any favors. Neither did covering the protagonist and antagonist in mud for most of the first half-hour....

But the biggest problem is that The Spirit always had a sense of whimsy. Yes, it was about a guy who fought crime and cheated death and had lots of violence, but it was always fun. Fun has never been Miller's strong suit, and he wouldn't know whimsy if it bit him on his ass. As a result, we have something that's too silly to work as gritty violence (or, to put it another way, as the Sin City clone this feels like), but too gritty to work as a Will Eisner piece.

You really gotta wonder what Zack Snyder -- who did such a good job of translating both Watchmen and Miller's own 300 to the screen -- would've done with this. Snyder, in fact, out-Miller'd Miller with 300, but he understood the difference between that and Watchmen and adapted accordingly. Miller, though, seems to be just copying what Robert Rodriguez did (better) in Sin City, and it just doesn't work.

There were good points: Sarah Paulson was born to play Ellen Dolan; Louis Lombardi is hilarious as multiple similarly named, not-too-bright, cloned thugs of the Octopus's; and Stana Katic is marvelous as the eager-to-please Officer Morgenstern, a Bizarro-world version of Kate Beckett from Castle.

But ultimately, this movie deserves every nasty thing said about it. Bleah.