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The Spirit (2008)
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Writer/director Frank Miller builds on bringing his own Sin City graphic novel to the screen with this super-stylised superhero noir, based on Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic-book series. Gabriel Macht stars as the titular indestructible, masked crime fighter, who engages in a cat-and-mouse battle with megalomaniac villain the Octopus (Samuel L Jackson on autopilot) for an immortality serum. Retaining the look of Miller's earlier film, flesh-and-blood actors are shot against a green screen with everything else added in digitally. The black-and-white palette (with bursts of colour, mostly red) provides plenty of visually arresting images, but the overall tone of the story falls somewhere between camp excess and poker-faced pulp. Pneumatic ladies abound for the teenage boy demographic (Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, a seemingly embarrassed Scarlett Johansson), but the pretty pictures might have held more power if Miller had stuck to Eisner's 1940s milieu instead of relying on modern-day shoot-'em-up action clichés. AC
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Tell us what you think
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Running time
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97min
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Country of origin
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US
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Genre
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Action Crime Drama
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Alternate title
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Will Eisner's The Spirit
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Original language
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English
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Screenplay
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Frank Miller, from a comic book by Will Eisner
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Theatrical distributor
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Lions Gate
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UK cinema certificate
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12A
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UK cinema release date
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January 2009
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Film certification logos reproduced by kind permission of BBFC |
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