In Sin City, gore and brutality are an end in themselves.

Rating: 1/10 (11 April 2005)

To speak against violence in film is bound to earn me the status 'unenlightened' or 'moralistic'. Nonetheless, it is not violence that is the target of my criticism, but rather the glorification of violence for its own sake. For example, the violence in Fight Club, while sometimes intense, is explored as a means of finding release. The gore in Luc Besson's The Messenger is actually discussed in the film, critiqued as part of the brutality of war.
In Sin City, however, gore and brutality become an end in themselves. The film offers up a nihilistic world in which desensitized youth living a vicarious viciousness through comics and video games can legitimize their perversions in the name of fidelity to the original. A few key points in the film serve to illustrate:  In one scene a woman explains, as she holds up the grisly, sewn-up stump where a serial killer has severed her hand, that he made her watch as he ate it.
 In another, the antihero Marv has sawn off the arms and legs of the bound serial killer, and lures a wild dog to tear at his flesh and eat him alive. This is one of several scenes of torture that Marv says he enjoys.
 In still another scene, which could have been right out of Kill Bill, the focus is on how much brutality the prostitutes could inflict. The pretense is to talk of skill at swordplay, but this only underscores how much the visual emphasis was on the damage being inflicted.
 In a later scene, the hero Hartigan beats in the face of a psychopath until it is a liquid pulp.
One can pretend the morality of torture, terrorism, killing sprees, and savagery by claiming the victims deserved it, or harp on the fact that the film mirrors the comic book, but those are certainly non sequiturs. Even it's more perceptive fans see it, though they may choose to call it "terrifically violent" or "ultraviolent" "Sin City has more severed heads, dismemberment's and acts of cannibalism than The Silence of the Lambs and Freddy vs. Jason put together. I loved it!" -- Staci Layne Wilson, HORROR.COM The film caters to the most heartless inclinations of its audience. As an interaction between art, artist, and audience, we can see the animator spending more camera time and dialogue on the gore and the nihilism justifying it than anything else, while the audience oohs, ahs, cheers, and laughs at precisely the calculated moments.
The film is a commentary on the ethical state of the West, as much as on Frank Miller's original work. The people that can justify terror in the name of terror, bombing villages and hospitals out of revenge, has created a generation that doesn't flinch at amputation, but sees human suffering as on a par with baiting a hook. It is a culture that is broken, that lacks some fundamental elements of mercy, compassion, and empathy that would otherwise typify humanity.
True, the film is fiction. But fiction mirrors life. Art offers us possible worlds that we can envision as real, and our reactions to those worlds are less predicated on the fact that they are fictional than on the actual values of the audience. If not, we must ask why the audience is actually cheering and clapping so enthusiastically.
In the end, the ethos of the film is the ethos of the audience, and the posturing about brilliant cinematography is a confession that there is actually something of which normal people should be ashamed.
Just as The Passion reflects the West's obsession with the cruelty inflicted on Christ, so Sin City is an example of its passion for precisely that cruelty. It has become trite to say that we are the culture of the Roman Arena, the spectacle of suffering, the carnival of gore. Trite, not because it isn't true, but precisely because it is  because the fact of it is even more commonplace than the observation.