8. The Spirit (2008)
Frank Miller will be known to most as the genius who wrote the source material for Robert Rodriguez's fantastic
Sin City, and Miller also ended up earning a co-director credit himself. His follow-up,
The Spirit - an adaptation of Will Eisner's newspaper comic strip - was therefore hotly-anticipated as the next big property that Hollywood was taking on. However, even in the light of Christopher Nolan's revitalisation of the comic book film, Miller proved he hadn't been paying any attention, with a dull, scarcely comprehensible farce that embarrasses just about everyone involved except the one guy who seems to "get" the film at all - Samuel L. Jackson. Lead Gabriel Macht is a bland and uninspired choice for the titular superhero detective, but the real problem is the film's frenzied insistence on stylising itself to death, taking Miller's dazzling aesthetic employed in Sin City and embossing it in murky cinematography, making more than a few scenes depressingly challenging just to make out what the Hell is taking place on screen. Plus, Miller evidently was not a "co-director" with Rodriguez, because Miller quite literally finds himself unable to direct even basic scenes of exposition competently; he doesn't have a clue what he is doing. Only one scene even sticks in the mind vaguely four years later; a hallucinogenic sequence in which Samuel L. Jackson dons a Nazi uniform, and I can't for the life of me remember why. And not even the sight of Eva Mendes baring her ass can make it any better.