Free popcorn for reviewers was the best thing The Spirit has going for it. Indeed the only thing, even if mid-teens should find something in director-writer Frank Miller’s 108-minute mélange of color-coded live action and CGI gimmicks dominated by black-screen-red-necktie effects.

Bernie Taupin wrote for Elton John that “comic book characters never grow old.” While the cardboard personalities remain enviably unchanged over decades, the screen resurrections of so many, with more on the runway to crash and burn, are wearing thin even with added anachronistic “with-it” slang and gadgets galore.

At the film’s press junket Samuel L. Jackson inadvertently nailed a major flaw in laughing while pointing out that many of the shticks had been brainstormed by actors virtually on set, judged by adults as funny for juveniles, and thus incorporated, e.g., his own Octopus’s tattoo makeup, an idea he got watching actresses apply their faces.

There’s also the hammy acting, appearing homage to the ‘40s-‘50s heyday of comic books until realization sets in about these performances being by grownups fooling themselves that this is, no pun, the spirit of the genre and its time. To be fair to those embarrassed onscreen, the dialogue would tax the thespian talents of anyone, e.g., the villain’s brainy associate Silken Floss’ (Scarlett Johansson in horn-rims) cold glee that crime “is fun for me, after this deal my Ph.D. is all paid for.”

Aside from a late throwaway eight guns, the Nazi-ish bad guy -- also a Mexican bandito, fly street thug, medical doctor, and genetic scientist -- is Octopus for no reason, not even close to Spiderman’s octo-mechanical-armed nemesis. He battles police and their eye-masked normal-powers (except for rapid healing and occasional walks along high-voltage wires) champion Spirit (steely Gabriel Macht), derived from Miller’s friend Will Eisner’s 1940 creation.

In black relieved by a blood-red tie, the superhero is irresistible to the ladies, all the while insisting his heart belongs solely to beloved Central City. Years in the past, however, as an adolescent on a stoop he (Johnny Simmons) had given a locket with their photos to coy young Sand Saref (Saychelle Gabriel, a name worthy of a story character). But her cop father (David Wiegand) is killed at once, and, hating cops and “this dump, this hole,” the girl leaves for diamonds, long dresses, sports cars and money. He meanwhile grows to become a rookie policeman who is shot, mysteriously brought back from the grave and, his past as dead Denny Colt known only to the crusty Police Commissioner (Dan Lauria, as Dolan) who gives him the new nom de guerre, fights crime from his cemetery home shared with Arthur the Cat.

Unnecessary water sprite Lorelei (Jaime King) babbles unintelligibly now and then, also desires the hero, and hides in her river domain two sunken trunks. As hero and villain bash each other in the riverside mud, the important trunk is lost back into the water by the criminal’s cloned, replaceable, –os-named Three Stooges henchmen (all dozen or more by Louis Lombardi).

SPOILER ALERT

Tantalizing that he knows more about the Spirit than that do-gooder himself, Octopus withdraws for the moment. The good guy is patched up by the Commissioner’s uptight doctor daughter Ellen (Sarah Paulson), once cop Denny’s girl and now nominally Spirit’s but getting nowhere near the commitment she wants. Other lovelies pop up, including the following: adoring policewoman Morgenstern (Stana Katic); an old flame on the wrong side, belly-dancing knife-and-scimitar adept Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega);  and grown Sand (Eva Mendes), now an international jewel thief who photocopies her derrière and causes deaths but does not dirty her hands.

The familiar locket points to Sand’s presence at the opening slugfest on the mudflats. Indeed she was there, for the two titanic crooks sought to strike a bargain for the submerged trunk. Nothing is ruined in revealing that it contains a vase, something for her that has to do with the Golden Fleece of Jason and the Argonauts, and for him the blood of half-god half-mortal Heracles/Hercules.

Jumble together an updated retro superhero against his megalomaniac opponent, attractive women good and evil, fistfights, firepower, noise, mythology and mystery, all pasted with computer hocus-pocus, and what do you get? Well, if the Spirit can turn over in his grave, he’s doing just that.

(Released by Lionsgate and rated “PG-13” for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity.)