...is a perfect comic book adaptation though it made almost a shot-to-shot transition from the paper to celluloid.

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2009)

...is a perfect comic book adaptation though it made almost a shot-to-shot transition from the paper to celluloid. It's noir, it's cool, it's brutal, it's sexy - it's black and white, with dashes of colour.
Sin City brings together three separate story lines, each of them as interesting as the other - and forms a working combination with three different kinds of characters, with three different kinds of an approach to the world of sin. It's a great ensemble of a cast, Hollywood's biggest names filling the screen and pulling it off - Bruce Willis, Benicio del Toro, Michael Madsen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy etc. - though Clive Owen has always been a really big question mark for me when it comes to his acting talent. Elijah Wood and Rutger Hauer in their small roles deserve extra praise. All them aside, the real star of the movie is undoubtedly Mickey Rourke as Marv, the hulking thug. Even from under all that make-up and plastic, Mickey is able to deliver the best and most solid performance in the whole film. He's truly believable as a comic book caricature - which is something marvelous to accomplish.
The movie excels visually - the black and white world with some coloured highlights is a refreshing approach - the play between light and shadow is a beautiful thing to look at and I especially loved the very "comic-bookish" - all black character figures against the pail white background - segments. The angles, the sets, the camera-work - it's all good and really separates this as a comic book filmatisation rather than a film based on a comic book. Sin City was filmed against a green screen from start to finish with very little real set props to be truthful visually towards the source material - and it occasionally shows pretty obviously as the CGI and the real life characters don't always blend as good as you'd hope.
Still, Rodriguez and Miller have done something really astonishing with their film and I'm ever so eager to see a sequel. 3/4