Frank Miller was one of the handful of creators who helped revolutionize comics and graphic novels in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that two of Miller’s creations, “Sin City” and “300,” made the jump from page to screen and brought in big box office returns. On the strength of those two features (directed by Robert Rodriguez and Zach Snyder, respectively), Miller landed a directing gig of his own—an adaptation of “The Spirit,” a comic series created by pioneering writer/artist Will Eisner in the 1940s that’s still kicking around today. Eisner, who passed away in 2005, was one of Miller’s mentors, and pairing “The Spirit” with Miller seemed like a safe, logical choice.

But “Sin City” and “300” came from the Frank Miller of almost two decades ago. We’re dealing with a very different Miller these days. He indulges full-bore in his obsessions—hard-boiled violence, pulp dialog that would make Mickey Spillane grimace, sexy ladies in a variety of fetish gear and so on—but he’s a little more silly about it than in the past. One only need look at “All-Star Batman and Robin,” his most recent comics work, to see how Miller’s changed. The violence is just as brutal, but more cartoonish. The girls are still clad in fishnets and leather, but they’re so out of proportion that titillation gives way to laughter. In “All-Star,” the perennially pissed-off Dark Knight goes around referring to himself as “the goddamned Batman,” a moniker the rest of the characters adopt. 

This has been Miller’s shtick for the last six or seven years—bouts of outrageousness (intentional or otherwise) that echo back to his earlier works. There was talk for a while of his pitch for a Batman-versus-al Qaeda comic called “Holy Terror, Batman!”, but that fell to the wayside. Whether Miller is purposefully parodying himself and the conventions that solidified his reputation in the 1980s or he’s just gone a little nuts isn’t clear. Whichever the case, comic fans have gotten used to the joke, though some are less appreciative of Miller’s crazy-uncle act than others.

Hollywood isn’t in on the joke, though, and the success of “Sin City” and “300” allowed Miller access to a camera, a bevy of beauties and a giant illuminated canvas on which to indulge his every whim. As a result, “The Spirit” is the sort of film an antsy, horny 13-year-old boy might make. It’s a mess, of course, and the story, characters and everything else take a back seat to Miller’s hyper-stylized vision of a noir superhero and the city (and women) he loves.

With all that, “The Spirit” has no choice but to be at least a little entertaining. There are melting cats, weird mutants and Samuel L. Jackson, first in a samurai outfit and, later, in full Nazi regalia complete with a monocle. Dudes explode, Eva Mendes photocopies her ass, Dan Lauria (the dad from “The Wonder Years”) acts grumpy as the city’s beleaguered police commissioner, and did I mention Sam Jackson’s outrageous costumes? He paints a zebra-stripe pattern into his eyebrows in the third act and wears a matching fur coat. It’s that sort of movie.

It’s also the sort of movie with a half-baked plot that’s over-explained by the protagonist’s relentless voice-overs. The masked crime fighter known as The Spirit is actually former cop Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht). Gunned down in the line of duty, Denny was injected with some weird chemical that brought him back to life. Given a second chance, Denny put on a snappy hat, a bright red tie and dedicated himself to battling evil in Central City. That weird chemical Denny was injected with? That was courtesy of The Octopus (Jackson), an arch-criminal with an outlandish wardrobe, an army of cloned henchmen and gal Friday named Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson). Added to this already bloated mix is Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), The Spirit’s teenage sweetheart turned master criminal and probable subject of countless dirty typography jokes. Everyone fights and double-crosses each other in pursuit of some magical artifacts that seem out of place even in all this lunacy.

“The Spirit” opens with a fight between The Octopus and The Spirit. Battling in a muddy swamp, the two bash each other with the following items: a severed head, a toilet, a giant wrench and a kitchen sink. It’s cartoony in all the ways you’d expect, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if that toilet had a big Acme logo on the back. Noir conventions collide with campy slapstick, and whether Miller is successful depends on if you’re laughing with the movie or at it. You may wind up doing both.

Jackson, it seems, is the only cast member who managed to get in on whatever joke Miller is telling. He cackles with glee and doles out quotable non sequiturs (at one point, he pledges to make The Spirit “as dead as ‘Star Trek’”), all while donning and doffing increasingly silly costumes. He’s having a good time, at least, but the same can’t be said of Macht. For charismatic lothario of a superhero, his Spirit is awfully bland, lacking the sort of goofy charm that should be front and center in this sort of movie. And while much of the film’s marketing has centered on the cast of femmes fatale, apart from providing eye candy, they don’t do much for the film. Mendes is the most interesting of the bunch, but that’s only because she’s granted something of a back story. Johansson is flat and wooden and mostly out of place when placed next to the manic energy of The Octopus.

There’s manic energy to spare in “The Spirit,” but no one, not even Miller, can seem to rein it in and channel it into something constructive. Miller zigs and zags all over the place, cribbing bits from “Sin City,” Raymond Chandler and Looney Tunes and mixing in his own artistic quirks. The striking red, black and white color palette the film uses is as dynamic as it was in “Sin City,” but here, it’s all gloss and flash and broad strokes, lacking the sort of detail, however stylized, that Rodriguez and Snyder captured in “Sin City” and “300.”

In terms of an adaptation of Will Eisner’s comic series, “The Spirit” misses more than it hits. The goofy humor is there, but the intelligence and subtle tweaking of crime comic conventions are missing. But there’s no point in dragging Eisner into this—“The Spirit” is Miller’s vision alone. If all he’s doing is having a laugh, then perhaps “The Spirit” will, in a few years, turn out to be an underappreciated cult classic that no one “got” the first time around. But it may very well be that Miller is just being wildly self-indulgent and unrestrained. If that is the case, it’s amusing to watch him make a mess, but sad to see such energy go to waste.