The beautiful die young.

In the case of Frank Miller’s adaptation of the acclaimed comic book series by Will Eisner, this visually arresting film stutters and falls during the raspy opening voiceover, delivered by the eponymous avenger as he coos over the crime-riddled metropolis of Central City.

‘She is my love, she is my life and I am her spirit,’ he growls, trying to convince us that the digitally fashioned, colour-bleached backdrops pulsate with life.

We don’t believe a word of it.

Indeed, we don’t believe any of the characters in The Spirit, who spit hard-boiled one-liners at one another without ever truly registering that they exist in the same, wintry universe, lit up by occasional, lurid splashes of blood red.

Every woman in the film swoons helplessly in the presence of the crusader, even though he hides his pretty boy looks behind a mask and his personality (or anything approaching charisma) behind snappy dialogue like, ‘I am going to kill you all kinds of dead.’ Rookie cop Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) returns from the dead as The Spirit, delivering his own brand of tough justice in Central City alongside the boys in blue commandeered by police chief Dolan (Dan Lauria), whose daughter Ellen (Sarah Paulson) is the latest feisty femme to succumb to the crime-fighter’s non existent charms.

In his new guise, Denny wages war on cackling arch-nemesis and cold-hearted killer, Octopus (Samuel L Jackson), who seems determined to destroy the city and its denizens in his pursuit of immortality, with the help of his scheming secretary Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) and various genetically engineered henchmen (all played by Louis Lombardi).

Meanwhile, slinky jewel thief Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) and her associate Mahmoud (Eric Balfour) stumble into the middle of the criminal mastermind’s plot.

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The Spirit mimics the stylistic flourishes of Sin City but Miller’s cartoonish caper doesn’t possess any of that picture’s wit or drama, staggering into the realms of the absurd when the resurrected cop and his arch-nemesis trade vicious blows in a pool of mud, walloping one another with bricks, a toilet and a metal kitchen sink.

The only thing missing are hand-drawn animated KAPOWs.

Performances range from the mechanical to the outlandish, with Jackson chewing so much scenery, you fear he might start gnawing through the celluloid and sink his teeth into the big screen itself.

A torture scene in Nazi attire, in which Octopus reminisces about the moment Denny became his alter ego (‘You were perfect, dead as Star Trek, and I was your coroner…’) is bizarre as it is tasteless.

When The Spirit cuts Octopus short and quips, ‘Pardon me, is there a point to this? Because I’m getting old just listening to you?’ we can’t help but think that this should have been our line to Miller and everyone involved in such a sorry mess.

• Release Date: Thursday 1 January 2009
• Certificate: 12A
• Runtime: 102mins