Based on a comic that has perhaps been the only independently published book to match the DC and Marvel characters in popularity. This goes farther than most of these films in bringing unearthly powers into the everyday world.  The premise -- that behind these exotic characters is none other than Satan (though not known by that name) makes this possible.  Our hero is an intelligence- agency assassin named Al Simmons, who gets killed by his boss.  But dying horribly is just a prerequisite for the chance to be resurrected as a "hellspawn" -- a soldier in Satan's army of demons.  John Leguizamo's performance as the Clown -- the obnoxious agent of evil who mentors and hectors our hero -- is a blast; more fun than a barrel of skunks.

This was possibly the first serious action movie to rely heavily on digital animation for depicting unearthly effects -- especially Spawn's cape, which is cooler than any other superhero's because it's prehensile.  Nowadays the digital look has dated and the film's limited budget is very obvious, but in spite of that, the makers of this film created a visual style that remains unique.

The story is pretty well constructed.  The human bad guys are somewhat too bad to believe, but if you acccept the premise of Satan giving their orders, it makes sense.  The usual overwrought superhero origin story comes across with less of a sense of cliché in this case than in most others, especially since it's not settled whether the protagonist really belongs on the side of the good guys until fairly late in the movie.  If your tastes run more towards the really comic-booky side of the comic book film, as opposed to the movie-ish side -- if you value Sense of Wonder above believable realism -- then, unpretentious B-movie though it is, this is a good deal better than most.

And it has the coolest-looking ending credits of any action movie I've seen.

Hey, this reminds me: you know what comic book character I'd really like to see them make a movie of?  Etrigan the Demon.  "Gone! Gone! the form of man..."  As long as it's the original Jack Kirby version and not the poseur-ass nineties Demon who always speaks in rhyme.  Pretty unlikely they'll ever give either one a movie, I suppose.