laughably bad, "Plan 9" bad, how do movies like this get made?

Rating: 1/10 (5 April 2005)

You take an intriguing concept (a hard boiled noirish graphic novel) and some fantastic visuals and throw in some big names (Willis, Alba, Elijah Wood) and what do you get? A great big piece of junk! First off, anyone who claims to have enjoyed this film is lying through their teeth. It's one of those situations in which the critics are too scared to pan it because it's "different" and they don't want to be seen as passe.
The acting is over-the-top bad, the dialogue is corny and the delivery is pathetic. Powers Boothe, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen? Come on! Can you have a LAMER cast? Owen couldn't even act in those BMW shorts.
I would laud the visuals and cinematography but the storyboards were done by a legendary artist. All you have to do is translate the beautiful Frank Miller panels into a world of motion and your're done. Oh, you might want to get some decent actors and freshen the corny script up a bit.
The lack of understanding of what good film-noir is (by all involved) is truly mind boggling. The anti-hero of film noir is neither a superhuman comic book hero nor a sociopathic sicko. A true anti-hero of film noir is a flawed, vulnerable, tough as nails reflection of an everyman. He makes decisions based on reason and logic.
This film is inept on almost all levels including sub par editing, directing, acting, and writing.
Without any sense of realism, there is no grittiness or real pain. The lame adolescent attempts at humor only accentuate this. Instead of having the stones to go completely over the top a la early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi we get something Ed Wood might have made in the era of CG. Instead of a tribute to the graphic novel what we get is a slickly repackaged "Dick Tracy" meets "Dark City".