Sin City (2005) **

Rating: 5/10 (20 May 2005)

I've never read the original comics by Frank Miller, but the noirish ads for this looked delicious enough to make me long to see it. Very "Gotham Cityesque", moody black and white photography, a fairly exciting cast, and the semi-involvement of Quentin Tarantino, one of the greatest filmmakers on the job today for my money.
So what went wrong? Everything but the visuals. SIN CITY is extremely cool to look at and wonderfully captures the world of the comics, but that's pretty much it. Only one of its three vignettes is interesting, that being the one with an unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as the hulking brute Marv, who's on a mission to track down whoever was responsible for killing the prostitute he was sweet on. The other two stories (one with Bruce Willis, another with Clive Owen) are not nearly as involving. Even less effective is that the three tales don't mesh together by the time it's all over (and that takes forever). Action aplenty, but so much of it all over the place that it gets repetitious instead of thrilling. Performance-wise, Rourke is good (though some of that is due to his extreme makeup), but Willis seems to be phoning this one in. Elisha Wood appears ridiculous, and hottie Jessica Alba's acting is ... well, ...Jessica Alba's a hottie... ** out of ****