Disappointingly boring.

Rating: 1/10 (8 April 2005)

I give this 1 star out of 10.
I had high expectation when I saw this movie a couple of hours ago because of the high marks given by other reviewers but this movie sucks. In fact, I was so bored that I left the theater after viewing about 75% of the movie. I should have left earlier.
The movie Sin City, as I understand it, was an adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller. For those of you who do not know who he is, this guy is huge in the comic book industry. Although I have not read this series, I understand that it was very popular with the readers.
First, what I liked about the movie was that it was in black and white, for the most part, while using color for certain objects to magnify a certain scene. That's about it for the likes and now the dislikes.
What I did not like about the movie was that it was not one story but multiple separate stories in the movie. The movie was basically stories about this make believe place called Sin City and the crimes that plagues it. This multiple story telling does not give enough time for one to understand the characters of one story before it ends and a new story begins. I think the reason for telling the story in this fashion was to give an overall look at Sin City as the main character in this story. It is an interesting way of telling a story but it was not well done. The only recent movie that I could remember that had similar multiple story telling in one movie was Animatrix, the animated movie about the story of the Matrix. Unlike Animatrix, however, Sin City just was not done well done.
Given that the movie had to show multiple stories within a certain amount of time, some things had to be cut, and in this case it was character development. Each character was flimsy in their demeanor with no distinguishable characteristics.
As for the violence, I know some IMDb viewers did not appreciate the movie because of it but I love gratuitous violence as long as it is placed correctly. However, violence cannot be rampant throughout the movie because then it looks silly and comical, which is exactly how it looked in this movie. As Eddie Murphy once said, his comedy routine is not simply a series of bad words alone, but that there is a story in his comedy routine and that he uses bad words simply to accentuate it.
Food for thought for future story tellers.