nice visuals, shame about the movie!

Rating: 3/10 (5 January 2006)

this movie is not completely without merit, in that the visuals are impressive in some scenes... but it hurts that so much time and effort could go into lovingly recreating something as bland as the sin city comics appear to be...
i'm speaking from the point of view of someone who has not read the original comic books this movie is based on... according to many of the comments here, the movie is a VERY accurate in relation to the source material... too bad, eh? the movie is made up from three separate stories, using the same location and some crossover of characters... however, these stories do not seem to have much impact on each other... this is not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case i kept expecting the plots to tie up cleverly with each other... this didn't happen... not much cleverness happened at all, unless you count the CGI boys back at the film lab...
Bruce Willis heads the cast in the first story, "That yellow bastard", and he is his usual, likable self... Bruce Willis defies the bad/good actor tag for me, as i usually like him no matter what, even if the performance is poor...
the storyline begins promisingly, then fizzles into a sort of very poorly developed male fantasy... it's the usual unlikely scenario leading to a very young woman digging an old guy (quite a Hollywood staple, except for when they switch it round to having a hot 16 year old girl digging a 13 year old boy)... he resists her, there's some random violence using the ridiculous villain from the first part of the story, and the noble end... this one is the only sin city instalment to be split into two halves, the last part making up the end of the movie... skip the last half, it'll just ruin the memories of what came before...
the second story follows mickey Rourke (who i think is an underrated actor) as a hulking ex-con chasing the killer of a prostitute "who gave him the night of his life"... by now the narration will be starting to annoy you... i appreciate a certain amount of cheesy dialogue is needed, but it just gets far too cheddary...
you'll also notice something halfway into this plot line... sin city has NO clever stories... it doesn't really have a story at all... lots of bursts of hyper violence, atmospheric shots of the face, cheesy dialogue, back to the hyper violence... i'm not really offended by violence (nothing in this movie seemed offensive because it was all so ridiculous) but i found the repeated gore to be dull and tedious... this movie has no substance whatsoever...
some of the things that happen in this part are just plain unbelievable... i know it's a comic book, but the scene of Marv getting hit by a car numerous times... well it's just dumb... then he gets knocked out by one blow with a sledgehammer... dumb again...
the actors try their best... they might has well cast a complete unknown for Elijah wood's part... could have saved some cash there...
anyway, this storyline was only a warm up for the crowningly bad moment in the movie... the big fat kill! be amazed at the blandness of Clive Owen...
be astonished at the worst line i've heard in a year, at the end... if you need a pointer, listen out for the word "valkyri"... be dazzled by the pointlessness of the plot, coupled with its illogicality...
this is when it hits a new low... there's one good morsel when benicio's character Jackie boy starts talking after being killed (i think this scene was directed by Quentin Tarantino, who i'm sure had a hand in directing the warrior woman Japanese sword swinging babe scene too, even if he won't admit it)... it's a neat scene...
they could have quite easily left this one out and developed the other two a bit more... which brings up my point about the tie-in...
*SPOILER* the two psycho killers from the first and second stories BOTH USE THE SAME FARM TO KILL WOMEN... doesn't it get a bit crowded?... it seemed very unlikely to me... sorry i just had to mention that...
all in all, it's a seriously boring movie... it could have been 90 minutes, with more story, less gore, and the same great visuals... instead... it's just cruddy...