When I first heard that Frank Miller was making a movie based on The Spirit, I could have cared less. I did not know at the time who The Spirit was, or that the film had been based off of a comic book series. I found him to be about as interesting as The Phantom (a fellow Sunday serial comic book hero), which is to say, not very interesting at all. However, sometime later and thanks largely to the late Scans Daily, I eventually learned all about The Spirit and who he was and what kind of comics he came from. Then a friend of mine reviewed the movie and got me interested in seeing it for myself, so when I found it at a Blockbuster that was going out of business, I decided to grab it. I’m very glad I did, because this film is quite possibly the best one I’ve seen since I’ve started writing reviews professionally here on FireFox News.

The Spirit is a crime-fighting detective who made his debut in the Sunday papers during the 1940’s, placing him alongside other greats of the Golden Age. Some of them remained continuously popular and managed to survive into the present day (Superman, Captain America); The Spirit, however, was one of those old heroes who seemed to fade from popular consciousness as the arising generation of superheroes eclipsed him, their methods more proactive than his plodding noir style. This isn’t to say that The Spirit was without a colorful cast of characters, or that he didn’t survive into the present day, because both are true. He had appeared in a few comics and even had a team-up with Batman some time before this film was made, after the character was acquired by DC. This movie is perhaps the biggest thing to happen to the character since his heyday, and it is nice to see some of the lesser known Golden Age characters get their dues.

Wide-eyed detective Danny Colt was a beat cop working to keep safe the streets of Central City until he was brutally murdered by a gangster. Normally that would be the end of the story, but somehow Danny awakened in his grave and clawed his way back out into the world of the living. He found that he could not be killed by most conventional means, which allowed him to get more down and dirty with the local crime than the Central City police could. Adopting the nome du gure of The Spirit, Danny used his old connections as a detective to brokerage a deal with the Central City Police that allowed him to roam the streets as a vigilante, attacking criminals that might be too dangerous for regular officers to handle. Lurking in the shadows of Central City are many dangerous ruffians, but none as dangerous as the man called The Octopus, who rules over the Central City underworld with untold resources. In the film, Danny Colt finally tracks him down only to learn that The Octopus is eerily like him; he also cannot be killed, and like The Spirit, he recovers quickly from injuries that would lay out a normal man. Frustrated, The Spirit puts all his detective work into finding a way to bring The Octopus to justice.