Denny Colt is a dead police detective turned supernatural crime fighter in Frank Miller's comic-book adaptation The Spirit. (Maple Pictures)

Making up for The Dark Knight and all the other male-dominated superhero pictures this year, Frank Miller's The Spirit arrives for Christmas soaking in estrogen.

The Spirit's animated design is a seamless temporal mashup of the 1940s and the present day that's much more playful than The Dark Knight's retrofitted Gotham.

Mind you, its women are the stuff of adolescent male fantasies. They include Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), a Latino femme fatale with more curves than a mountain road; Dr. Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), a dishy Grace Kelly blond who wears a tasteful string of pearls – even in the operating room; and then there's Silken Floss (the ubiquitous Scarlett Johansson), a buxom brainiac in cat-eye glasses who has turned to a life of crime to pay for her PhD. There's also Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), a sword-swinging Folies Bergère dancer, and Morgenstern (Stana Katic), a rookie cop. Even Death is distaff, taking the form of a breathy siren played by Jaime King.

Oh, yeah, there are some guys in the movie, too. Like the main character, Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht), a dead police detective who has been mysteriously revivified and is now seemingly indestructible. In his posthumous guise as the Spirit, he prowls the noir-y metropolis of Central City, nattily attired in fedora and red silk tie, and continues to battle crime. His arch enemy is the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson), a mad scientist who dabbles in drugs, prostitution and cloning. The last explains his endless supply of cheerfully dopey henchmen (all played by Louis Lombardi), who look like Curly from the Three Stooges.

Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) is a globe-trotting jewel thief in The Spirit. (Maple Pictures)

The plot concerns the Octopus's attempt to get his tentacles on a Greek vase containing the blood of Heracles, which will render its drinker immortal. Standing in his way is globe-trotting jewel thief Sand Saref, who possesses the vase as well as another hot mythological item, Jason's golden fleece. As it happens, Sand is also our hero's boyhood love, whose return to Central City threatens to derail his ongoing romance with Ellen. She's the daughter of irascible police commissioner Dolan (played to hardboiled perfection by Dan Lauria), the Spirit's reluctant ally and the only one who knows his true identity.

I admit I have only a nodding acquaintance with the film's source material, Will Eisner's seminal 1940s comic book. (I've always confused it with The Spectre, which was also about a dead cop turned supernatural crime fighter.) However, it's evident that writer-director Miller, a fellow graphic artist, has approached this adaptation with great affection. You can hear it in the vintage wisecracking dialogue, and you can see it in his animated design, a seamless temporal mashup of the 1940s and the present day that's much more playful than The Dark Knight's retrofitted Gotham.

Miller, who created the original Dark Knight graphic novels, made his filmmaking debut in 2005 with the relentlessly gory cult hit Sin City. That movie and 300 (2006), both based on Miller graphic novels, were notable mainly for their technical wizardry; they used CGI to plunk live actors inside the artist's distinctive shadow-laden illustrations. In other respects, though, they were strictly for the fanboy demographic. The Spirit, Miller's first solo directing effort, is more audience friendly. It has a loose, good-natured vibe. It reminded me a little of The Phantom (1996), an underrated film also based on a Golden Age comic-book hero.

Eisner's creation was the forerunner of the adult comic, and The Spirit plays up the fact that the dapper hero is a ladies' man. Miller pretty much lets those ladies run away with the picture: next to Mendes's derriere-twitching Saref and Johansson's eyelash-batting Floss, poor Gabriel Macht – an up-and-comer in his first lead role – doesn't stand a chance. His Spirit has the right superhero look – blue eyes, square jaw – but he makes little impact.

The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson, centre) and his partners in crime, Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson, right) and Phobos (Louis Lombardi, rear), are up to no good in The Spirit. (Maple Pictures)

If the women don't own the movie outright, it's only because Jackson gives such a creepily flamboyant performance as the Octopus. His megalomaniac gene-splicer is a big, bald crazy in runny mascara whose eight "arms" are actually four sets of pistols. Jackson plays him with unhinged gusto, as if he were channeling campy 70s TV pitchman Geoffrey Holder. The film's only misstep is a scene in which the Octopus and Silken, his partner in crime, inexplicably show up in Nazi uniforms. Miller may have intended it as an homage to wartime comics, when the Third Reich became a real-life source of villainy. Without any context, though, the scene is a bit tasteless, an ugly reminder of genuine evil that dampens the movie's cartoon mood.

Otherwise, I got a kick out of Miller's alternate universe, where cops have high-tech weapons but drive 40s-model squad cars, or a drop-dead-gorgeous woman who looks like she sauntered out of The Big Sleep will suddenly flip open a cellphone. The film's fond references to the past are a reminder that the noir genre, which seemed brutally realistic 60 years ago, is now a comforting source of nostalgia; Miller the artist lingers on every dank alley and rusty street sign like an old lover. Who knew that the man who gave us Sin City was such a softie?

The Spirit opens Dec. 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.