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You can't help yourself. You love them. At times you even cheer for them. And in the end you're moved by their rough humanity. I'm talking about my two favorite characters from "Watchmen," the noirish, fedora-donning, bitter little pill of Rorschach (so beautifully played by the great Jackie Earle Haley), and the deliciously unhinged Comedian (the magnetic Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose sexy, depraved masculinity will make him a huge star). These are characters who give you a jolt in every scene, characters/men that enact deeds and misdeeds that boggle your mind and sometimes make you watch with disbelief, either horrified by their shocking insensitivity (like when Comedian kills a woman pregnant with his child) or thrilled by the idea of wishing you could accomplish some of this business yourself (like when Rorschach breaks a prisoner's fingers).

Talking with the actors, I could see the glint in their eyes when I admitted such complicated, almost guilty admiration, though Haley states, "I don't think people want to do these things in the real world." Not missing a beat, Morgan (who has already put me off kilter by calling me his "wife") looks at me and exclaims, "She does! She did yesterday!"

"You did yesterday? There you go; works for me," laughs Haley.

But Morgan, who almost turned down the role after realizing his character is killed off at the picture's start (don't worry, he shows up throughout, though in my mind not enough), impishly understood the almost confusing appeal of his beyond-bad-boy character: "After reading the book ... [readers, and especially] women should just despise this guy. And yet, every time I read it, I found there was a charisma and a humanity to him that made me almost feel sorry for him. So, as an audience, yes, you walk out [of the movie] scratching your head thinking, 'Why don't I hate this guy?' Because you should. But ultimately you don't."

He's right. You certainly do not. He's the superhero version of Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo (from "Kiss of Death"). You can't wait to see him on-screen, even if he might, a la Widmark, push an old woman down a flight of stairs. And you also find a rough romanticism to Rorschach, a role many actors, big stars some of them, wanted to play, but which was given to non-Hollywood Haley, a smart move by director Zack Snyder. Haley is the picture's Travis Bickle and the movie's tormented soul.

Commenting on his casting process, Haley said: "It was a wonderful experience, a taxing experience because [Rorschach] is such a nut bag. But he's oddly admirable; his sense of no compromise, his sense of black-and-white justice. I had to gaze into the abyss just to wrap my head around this guy and see what makes him tick, and makes him who he is. It was a fascinating process."

Fascinating and engaging, perhaps too much so. After further discussing the picture's ideas, its political elements, its perfect mixture of realistic grittiness and hyper-reality, and asking how Morgan made a man who rapes a colleague and murders a pregnant woman so likable, Haley jokes to me: "You didn't want to do that yesterday, did you?"