Stylish, if not much else

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2006)

For pure visual presentation, Sin City is certainly one of the greatest movies ever made. It does a beautiful job of brining a nourish comic book sensibility to life, with a fascinating use of color.
And at first that and the movie's sense of degenerate cool is enough. As cop Bruce Willis goes after a psycho killer, the wit and the grit create a fascinating heightened version of film noir. I spent much of the movie wondering how one would describe it. It's not film noir, because it's so excessive, but while it is excess to the point of parody, it's not comical, and often the over-the-top grimness work.
Because it is so over-the-top, the movie can slip into stupidity and a simplistic view of the world that is in many ways the antithesis of classic film noir. The film shows its worst is a sequence involving the prostitutes of old town, which with its Irish mercenaries and Kill Bill-styled assassins is just plain silly. And the movie tends to wear on you, because it's pretty much the same thing over and over.
Still, it's high-cinematic cool pushes the rating from a 5 to a 7.