All style, no substance

Rating: 4/10 (12 April 2005)

Visually, 'Sin City' is incredibly impressive - it's impossible to conceive a more effective rendition of the modern comic/graphic novel. Fans of that genre, and devotees of slasher movies and Tarantino-style gorefests will be duly impressed.
I was looking for something with more substance (I know, stupid me, should have known better), and came away disappointed. The best thing about classic noir literature and movies, reflected to some extent in graphic novels by Frank Miller and others, is the sense they convey of social disarray and alienation. The fun is not just in the thrill, but in the knowledge that the sex and violence is telling you something about modern society - even, in an ironic way, criticizing our infatuation with sex and violence itself.
In 'Sin City', as in all the Tarantino-inspired crap so common today, sex and violence is an end in itself. True, Tarantino and his disciples love to masquerade as artists and cultural critics. Yet their cinematic sadism is simply juvenile. It consists of nothing more than pushing the envelope a little further, making your violence a little more graphic, a little more stomach-churning (castration, torture, suicide) - and outraging the same conventions that the dictates of political correctness makes it safe to outrage (the Catholic Church is always an easy target, and sure to delight the usual crowd: thus shooting a priest in the confessional, making a cardinal a cannibal, etc.; bashing the police provides the conventional anti-establishment tone). Of self-criticism of modernity by a modern there is, of course, none. - making Sin City wholly unlike the really great works of classic noir.
Was I the only one who found it ludicrous that while we're supposed to approve the torture, murder, etc., some of it aimed not just at villains but those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, we are still asked to show outrage at wife-beaters and child-molesters? Rodriquez, Tarantino, et al. still have their taboos - perhaps more than most of us.
Of course, as soon as you criticize 'Sin City' for its violence you'll be labeled as a religious fanatic or a hopeless prude. But these kind of accusations are nothing more than a dodge. I have no problem with book or movie representations of sex and violence, used artistically. Used as it is in Sin City, Natural Born Killers, or Kill Bill, it's just pointless and boring.