Visually imaginative, disturbing storytelling

Rating: 5/10 (10 April 2005)

It would be hard to do a better job praising the visual wizardry of this film than many of the posters before me. This movie is simply dazzling, and that held my attention throughout the whole 2 hours.
However, the sadistic violence became numbing. After a while, it became pornographic and fetishized -- it's somewhat disturbing that Frank Miller finds it (SPOILER TIME, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED) compelling to have characters shoot at a man's crotch (and then tops that near the end). This is combined with the constant victimization of women as a plot device. It sometimes seem like more women got hit in this movie than in Million Dollar Baby. This may be the one aspect of literally translating the Sin City comics to the screen -- the hard-boiled, ham-handed plots and dialog that may seem hard hitting on the page, take on an exponentially more visceral impact on screen. Thus, the violence, even at its most stylized, still becomes a bit much.