Problems with narrative structure mar beautiful surface

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2005)

Sin City is truly revolutionary. It is a stylistic masterpiece. The visuals are amazing in their blend of film noir, comic book styling, and use of color. This is the first time a comic has TRULY been brought to the screen.
Unfortunately the narrative structure allowed this otherwise flawless movie to falter.
The Sin City graphic novels are a collection of separate stories which occasionally loosely relate all in the place of Basin City. Each of the major characters of the film (Marv, Hartigan, and Dwight) have their own Sin City novel to stretch their arms in. Each is a story unto itself with its own beginning, middle, and end.
Sin City the movie contains three of these individual novels under one heading "Sin City." The film's director, Robert Rodriguez, opted not to do the film in an episodic fashion...or did he? This is where the film falters. He could have chose to do three individual episodes, each beginning with its own individual title: Marv, Dwight, Hartigan. But Rodriguez chose not to, instead he wanted to film a single, cohesive whole. This could have worked. But it was haphazard. Instead of having the stories weave together, he left the Marv and Dwight stories as episodes, split the Hartigan story in half to bookend the episodes, and did something with Josh Hartnet to bookend the bookends. The trouble with this is that the audience starts to search for meanings and connections as soon as Hartigan reappears. And the dots did not connect - just opened more questions.
I left the theater blown away by the visuals, but wondering if there was meant to be a greater story. I thought it might be the Roarke family...but the Dwight story had nothing to do with that. I thought it might be the prostitution community...but the Hartigan story did not deal with that.
In the end, it felt like a movie that should have been episodic but had delusions of cohesion. Were the visuals not so amazing and the adaptation so reverent, I would give this a 5/10. But all things considered I give it an 8/10.