Best comic book adaptation I've seen

Rating: 9/10 (28 July 2005)

Welcome to the Basin City, also known as Sin City, where women are pretty and booze is cheap. Welcome in the Sin City, where women are deadly. Sin City, where being good means to be bad. To be good in any means possible, because the men who are bad make Manson look like a kitty cat.
Whole base of Sin City, Fank Miller's graphical novels, are hard boiled, over the edge action, film noir influenced stories, in where even the most good men and women are capable of murder.
The movie is told in three separate stories, which have nothing to do whit each other, expect the fact that they are based in The Sin City. Each story is too short to work as a separate film, but in three separate segments, starring different people, they give out very good image of what is Sin City: revenge of the innocent, revenge for the loved ones, protection of the innocent.
Marv (Mickey Rourke) is on his way to avenge the dead of Goldie (Jaimie King), only woman who has ever loved him. Hartigan (Bruce Wills), a stand up cop in the City Of Sin, is jailed after stepping in too big toes, after saving Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) from a pedophile murderer Junior (Nick Stahl). And finally Dwight (Clive Owen) is trying to stop a war between police, the mafia and the old town hookers. As I said, these stories do not link up, even though there are some characters shown in the background of the other stories, there is minimal or none interaction between them. Each story roll in the end and after it's over the next one begins.
Visually Sin City is stunning, black and white, with some colored patches in here and there, like the babe wearing a red dress in the beginning or the blue eyes of Becky (Alexis Bidel). Blood is almost in all cases white, sometimes red and in one case yellow. But the action is always brutal, and sometimes even cartoony. The flick is actually filled with dark and twisted humor. At least the people in the theater were laughing, as was I.
There are lots of other stars as well in the movie, in fact the cast is impressive. All the parts are very surprising, like Elijah Wood as Kevin, a mute psychopath living under the protective wing of Cardinal Raork, played by Rutger Hauer.
As for the final stars, I cannot give out ten, because there were some actors that bothered me, like Jessica Alba, who is without any doubt a beautiful woman, but her acting as Nancy left room for improvement.
Sin City is the best comic adaptation I've seen to date: it sets new limits in both visual and in acting. The only thing I'm hoping, that directors wont start copying Rodriguez/Miller style mindlessly as happened whit Tarantinos style.
Speaking of directors, there has been lots of commission about Tarantino being a special quest director. I found that his influence was barely visible and not the worth of the whole ruckus, it was just a marketing trick nothing more in my opinion, but it doesn't take anything from the movie: it stays as Miller's vision. And Rodriguez's.