Polarised opinion

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2010)

There are some movies where it is difficult to offer excessive praise or condemnation - one expects to see them gain average marks from IMDb critics. Then there are those which polarise opinions: viewers love the movie or hate it. Sin City is one of those: it is very difficult to feel indifferent to it, and it's as well to know that going in.
If you're going to hate it, this will be because of the very high level of violence, brutality, and perceived misogyny. Well, if you're someone who fights shy of that sort of thing then I suggest steering clear of Sin City. It is violent and brutal.
But the violence is stylised - as is everything in the film - simply because it has been sourced directly from the pages of Frank Miller's comics. You can read the comics along with the movie and hear every word you read, and see every frame converted to movement. As someone who loves the comics, I thought initially that this would be a good thing. And it is, but it's also a bad thing because the film holds no surprises - none, count 'em, zero - for anyone who is familiar with the books.
For all that it is a striking, and largely successful, exercise in converting narrative from one medium to another.
The cast is uniformly excellent.