Advice for those still suffering from a New Year's hangover: avoid spirits in general and The Spirit in particular. Frank Miller's adaptation of the antique comic strip by Will Eisner is brash, noisy and so alarmingly ill-paced that it should, by rights, come with a software package that allows viewers to recut it as they see fit. I'd recommend hacking many of the major characters and bringing the whole thing in at a svelte 10 minutes. As one character puts it, "What's 10 minutes in a man's life anyway?"

As it stands, The Spirits runs for 103 minutes and spins its wheels for most of that. It's about a masked vigilante (Gabriel Macht) who wants to be Batman but apparently can't decide whether he's a dark, brooding angel of vengeance, like the Dark Knight, or a camp buffoon in the Adam West mould. Surrounding him on all sides are a gallery of two-dimensional femmes fatales, desultory hired goons and scenery-chewing villains. At one stage, Samuel L Jackson and Scarlett Johansson march onto the stage in gleaming SS regalia – presumably because they are, like, really bad dudes and this is what bad dudes do.

And so it goes, the film flitting endlessly, endlessly around its high-contrast, hyper-real urban jungle like a drunken tourist who has lost their way. Ostensibly, this urban jungle inhabits the same neighbourhood as the one Miller rustled up in Sin City, although this time the thrill has gone. The place looks a lot less dangerous, a lot less fun. It's like Times Square after the developers got at it.