Sin City's sins are Gluttony and Sloth, but forgivable...

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2005)

Sin City lives up to its sleazy moniker with high gloss and style. As expected, there's nary a shred of redemption in this hard-boiled film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City series, however, it carries with it a feeling of guilty pleasure, no matter how brutal and sadistic.
That said, the violence is highly stylized and defined by comic book physics. Characters are exploded, bullet blasted, even emphatically mutilated. No one dies until they're deliberately written out. The flick is literally pieced together by the panels that make up the graphic novels. It's shot in high contrast black and white with vibrant splotches of color to accentuate specific objects. The world this effect intones is completely convincing, unforgiving, and *cool*.
The cast can get away with a lot of toss away lines because they're in such a cool movie. Understanding that this was a very faithful adaptation,it would take a really stellar talent to pull off lines like "Kill him for me. Kill him good..."or "I've been killin my way to the truth...". But it is what it is. These words were born in little white bubbles.
On the performance side, Mickey Rourke makes this movie likable. He brings a lot of charm to the hulking, ugly brute Marv. His takes gleeful delight in the Hard Goodbye he gives to his Hooker With the Heart of Gold's murderers. Marv won over the theater audience who were pretty wary up till his entrance in the first of four lisle entwined sequences.. After him, it's hard to find characters to get behind, even though they're familiar faces. You kind of have to side with Bruce Willis's Hartigan, but he's trying to save a little girl from the rape murder promised by That Yellow Bastard, so what choice do you have?
The rest of the cast is suitable, even if it does feel like cameos. the story is self aware so it doesn't leave them much room for preening in like say, Oceans Tweleve. Bencio Del Toro will freak you out yet again. There's lots of Sin here. Plenty of lust, greed, and wrath. Lots and lots of wrath. Sin City comes close to drowning in it's own blood, though, as it recycles it's themes of Pride and revenge through constant, detached monologue. Fortunately, the visuals and high intensity atmosphere make Sin City the ride a comic book flick should be.