WorldofSuperHeroes.com offers news, interviews, previews, videos, games, discussion and more for all things Marvel, including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men and all your favorite superheroes, from comics to video games to movies and beyond.

Playing mix 'n match with retro-noir time travel, associated lingo and relatively futuristic gadgetry, comic book artist turned filmmaker Frank Miller (Sin City) gets revisionist with his take on the Will Eisner devil may care, born-again womanizing urban crime fighter, The Spirit. This reimagined tale with a flawed icon bent on giddily crushing the soaring Central City crime rate but ho hum about breaking assorted hearts of disposable dames and broads, is bound to limit his graphic appeal with both comic book purists and female audiences alike.

Surrounded by a menagerie of bizarre when not silly fellow citizens, the undead former rookie cop Denny Colt now morphed into The Spirit, runs interference with mixed results against Sam Jackson's fiendish extreme villain, Octopus and his shrewd sidekick Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson). More than evening the odds, Silken surrounds herself with a murderous crew of homicidal fatty clones like an underworld Madonna bossing around an obedient crew of bad and badder boy toys.

In the midst of perpetually picking up the pace of all sorts of erotic when not surreal sleuthing, Miller backs up for a coming of age, mean streets interlude when a smitten young Denny got dumped by materialistic teen hottie Sand Saref, (played in smoldering adulthood by Eva Mendes), who'd rather follow a career trajectory lusting after diamonds, when not stealing them.

Watchmen completely succeeds as an adaptation of a classic comic.

Up until the current renaissance in comic book movies, the result of a comic adaptation was hit or miss. For every Superman or Superman 2, there were quite a few films like Supergirl, Nick Fury, etc. Often the problem with these movies was that it was clear as day that a film executive had optioned a brand name character and built a crappy movie around that hoping to make a buck on action figures, toys, video games and other tie-ins. Since the X-Men movies and culminating in The Dark Knight, Hollywood got that you could make a movie true to the comic book without watering it down in crap.

Sometimes though you can be to faithful to a comic. Director Zack Snyder tried to replicate what he did with 300 and what Robert Rodriguez did with Sin City. The problem, I think, is that the source material for those previous works by Frank Miller were cinematic in nature. By comparison, I think Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a creature of the comic book world. It is a masterful thing, but essentially of comics.