Should have stayed 2 dimensional

Rating: 4/10 (15 June 2006)

How this movie ever got green-lighted, let alone how it got into the top 250 here, is something I'll never understand. I liked the graphic novels, but they were so dependent on text to tell the story that it was difficult to imagine how they would translate into moving pictures. The answer, of course, was voice overs...which are pretty much always a bad idea even when used sparingly. Here they make up at least a quarter (and possible as much as a half) of the entire dialog of the film, and for the most part are breathtaking in their banality. If I ever hear the phrase "Come on, old man" or anything else like it in a voice-over again, it will be far too soon.
I suspect that people are caught up in the stylistic cinematography, and it is very different and very interesting. It is both noirish and also gives the feel of the comic book roots of the project better than anything I've ever seen. But in the end, the voice overs destroy any good will that the ugly beauty of the camera-work builds up and the lackluster plots finish off any thoughts about ranking the movie above average. In the long run, Sin City will probably fall out of the top 250 in the same ignominious fashion as Titanic (another film that got by on hype and style rather than substance), which was rated #1 for a long, long time. It just bothers me that such a mediocre film could be so much higher than, say, Jaws. They didn't use a voice over to tell us why Quint hated sharks, and that's why it's a classic and why Sin City will be a forgotten curiosity.