In alternately, at times simultaneously, entertaining and disquieting ways Frank Miller has been losing it in slow motion over the last ten years or so. Despite its qualities, Sin City was one slow degeneration of the storytelling instincts of one of the truly great writers in mainstream comics of the last 25 years. An ongoing condensation of elements always present in his work, the series represented a fascinating, if often disheartening artistic development that now seems to be flatlining into irrelevance.

Hollywood and mainstream fame unfortunately do not seem to have provided the rejuvenation one might have hoped for. On the contrary; his films are mostly transpositions of what he does in comics to a medium on which he is much, much less proficient. The Spirit is awful, as predicted, but really it is not much worse than — or indeed all that different from — the Sin City flick: they share their stilted direction, sluggish pacing and lack of storytelling rhythm, a tin ear for what animates a given scene — whether it be action or talking heads — which results in several sequences dying on the screen, not to mention the strange belief that one can transpose untreated something that works in a comic into live action.