Incredibly violent but equally stylish; rather disconnected but unified enough.

Rating: 7/10 (4 April 2005)

As a warning to anyone interested in it, I must immediately point out that "Sin City" is an incredibly violent film including two separate scenes of a characters genitalia being removed (once by gunshot, once by hand), a woman biting into the neck of another woman, pulling the veins back out in her teeth, a man stabbing another in the chest just as a warning, and more gunshot wounds than all the James Bond movies combined--and that's just the start. The violent carnage of the film is absolutely and brutally beyond compare. Now to comments about the film.
"Sin City" is both the ultimate expression of and the ultimate satire of film noir--presenting the black and white backdrops, hard-boiled older detective-esqe tough guy heroes, the hysterical, mysterious, barely clothed women, the maniacally powerful villains and evil murderers, and the over-the-top dramatic narration that defines that genre, but doing so to such an extreme that it becomes a self-parody (I prefer to think on purpose). There are several different stories in the film only loosely tied together by the last one (and rather predictably and clumsily so), but they are all tied by the fact that they are truly all explorations of this city where violence is the center of life.
Robert Rodriguez's direction is definitely the film's true star. The black-and white look with the comic-book effect slanted rain drops (always, as in noir, present) and splashes of vibrant color is truly fascinating, and Rodriguez does explore the dramatic possibilities of black and white, perhaps reminding some viewers that color has disadvantages (though I'm betting it won't work on my father). The color, however, is seemingly random in when and where it appears, what gets colored, and what color it is. We see a red dress and red lipstick on the first woman we see, but shortly thereafter we see yellow blood, then blonde hair, then blue eyes, and there doesn't seem to be much of a common element to them. (The blue eyes are particularly unusual since they are used on one character who doesn't talk and one who talks too much.) Still, the look is so interesting that it does keep the viewer wanting to watch despite its weaknesses.
Meanwhile, the film's cast is a star party. When Rutger Hauer (admittedly past his peak but still a star), Elijah Wood (who just starred in three of the biggest hit films of all time and then had a supporting role in the indy hit "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," another success), and Benicio Del Toro (a deserved Oscar winner who has had success after success for the last decade) are your minor stars; you have a huge, huge cast. Surprisingly effective in the film is Bruce Willis. While it's not too far off of his typical slightly beaten, slightly on edge tough guy, this role allowed Willis to use his natural charisma to its best and to show more emotion than he usually does, and he was more than up to the challenge. Meanwhile, the film's only casting choices truly worth note are Elijah Wood's surprising turn as a silent villain and Rutger Hauer's somehow fascinating single-scene role as "the most powerful man in the state." Wood doesn't have to perform at all, but his appearance is rather startling just because it is so out of place for the empathic-eyed former hobbit. Hauer, however, creates the film's most interesting character in only one scene of work--we know that Cardinal better from that scene than we know Marv from his entire chapter, it seems, and he is absolutely fascinating.
The film also suffers some defects in its score, which is lackluster and recapitulate at best, and its oversexualized nature. Miller's world is sort of like the one in which Pete Dayton finds himself in David Lynch's brilliant "Lost Highway," a hyper-masculine, unreal world of unabashed sex and violence. However, where Lynch's film explores this world as a part of a man's unconscious, Miller's world truly IS. And that makes the extreme violence and sexuality much more discomfiting than Lynch's. While I'm not one to ask for any kind of censorship or anything, I will say that it's an over-the-top sexually and violently explicit world to the point that it is unnerving.
Overall, "Sin City" is a very stylish and rather interesting film. It's yet another attempt to bring back noir, like the aforementioned "Lost Highway's" noir update or Brian DePalma's attempts at more direct modernizations of noir, but it may do so the most effectively since it is the closest to true noir of these films and yet also takes Lynch at his word in creating a new noir for the 21st century by extending the noir principles and style in new and similar directions. Still, let's not forget noir has faults--predictable story lines, one-dimensional characters, over-the-top dramatics, and extreme violence being the most noticeable--and "Sin City" commits those sins (pun fully intended) full-force, sometimes brazenly and triumphantly marching over them and sometimes getting a rake in the face in the process. The characters aren't deep, the story lines aren't terribly original, and the violence is perhaps too much; but it's entertaining and perhaps even asks some good questions in the subtext.