Violence without depth = dull

Rating: 1/10 (14 September 2005)

So it looks like the comics. Well done. So it's a triumph of digital movie magic. Okay. So it's really, really violent yet by keeping the blood bright white it is kept tolerable for a more or less mass audience. ho-hum. The problem with Sin City is that it's totally uninteresting. The characters aren't clichés, they're caricatures of carbon copies of clichés. The 'stories' (it's really an insult to call them that) are so basic, so utterly devoid of anything resembling intelligence, wit, suspense, structure, relevance, depth, that it's impossible to care about any of these cardboard cut-outs. There's a lot of women empowerment in this film, except all women are whores, basically, who exist to service men or be their victims. All men perform astounding feats of violence and survive insane amounts of damage, which totally kills any suspension of disbelief. Robert Rodriguez still has absolutely no story sense or feel for pacing. The short story-system used for the film makes it fragmented and repetitive. Reading Frank Miller's comics will probably take all of ten minutes per episode. That's 40 minutes versus a two-hour film (which had deleted material to boot). And that's just far too much time to spend on these sadistic, shallow trifles which are terribly overrated as comics, let alone as films.