Whatever was Quentin Tarantino doing ...

Rating: 1/10 (22 June 2005)

... getting involved with a movie as genuinely awful as this? He's shown as "special guest director" which, I guess, means trying to make something from Miller's appalling script and the infantile sets and cinematography.
First the script ... it ain't one. It's four stories stitched together like Frankenstein's monster. Someone else has commented that the film is just like the comic books. Pretty easy to see why. Frank Miller just posted off a random selection of comic books with a note saying: 'There's the script, I'm off to the beach'.
Then there's the sets and the cinematography from Robert Rodriguez. Think a high school play and you get some idea of the cardboard sets. Then add the completely unoriginal idea that the movie will be in black and white with - are you ready for this? - a dress, a pair of eyes or a face in colour now and again. Result? Drab and boring after 30 seconds. Mindnumbingly tedious after 4 hours (it felt like the movie lasted that long).
And one final comment to get neatly back to the mention of Tarantino. The violence. In 'Kill Bill', Tarantino made killing stylish, exciting and humorous. No such luck here. In 'Sin City', it's brutal, unforgiving and vicious. Come on, Quentin. You're a hero of subversive, on-the-edge, pushing-the-envelope film-making. Why didn't you tell Frank to go home and actually try and write a film-length script? And why oh why didn't you tell Robert that his 'Spy Kids' trilogy doesn't qualify him to shoot movies for the grown-ups?
This is a sad movie. Sadder still, 'Sin City 2' is in production. The only good news is that with the cardboard sets and the appalling direction ("okay, guys, one take is enough because 2-D comic book characters don't need to have depth, subtlety or even character") it will take only take a couple of weeks to shoot, so the studio won't lose too much money.
1 out of 10 - and only that because a terrific trailer for 'Dark Water' preceded the disaster called 'Sin City'.