Best comic adaption yet

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2005)

Sin City is a very stylized adaptation of the cult "graphic novels" (comic books) of Frank Miller. It takes 3 of the more interesting substories in the 7 book Sin City collection and weaves them together very much like Pulp Fiction. Being that the director Rodrigez & Miller used the actual comic stories themselves instead of movie storyboards, the movie stays extremely close to the original works.
The first thing you've probably noticed about the trailers is the black & white comic book style screen rendering. I was skeptical that they could pull this effect off but it turns out to work incredibly well. The feature is it enables colorization of the key elements of the movie giving them more attention. It also portrays a very surreal world that enabled the movie makers to do very interesting things that would probably make you roll your eyes if you saw it in a traditional style movie.
The most important warning that any responsible reviewer will initially give is the unbelievable vulgarity & violence of this movie. Violence not in the sense of people just dying. Violence in the sense of dismemberment and very sick and disturbing scenes of poor girls getting miscellaneous body parts chopped off. Everything is shown as if to purposely disturb the audience. If this movie didn't have the comic book, unrealistic look and feel to it, it definitely would have been NC-17 and maybe even worse. If you don't want your kids or sensitive wife to be traumatized for a while, keep them the hell away from this movie. They'll have nightmares for the foreseeable future.
However this shouldn't stop those of you from seeing it who thoroughly enjoyed films such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Snatch, Man on Fire, and the Punisher. Actually, aside from the aforementioned, the movie this most reminds me of is Payback, with the very cool voice over effects, atmosphere, and the fact that most of the 3 stories involve some kind of revenge by an initially not so nice person. Many will compare this film to "Kill Bill", but Sin City is a lot more serious, darker, and ten times better than that Tarantino hackjob piece of crap.
Acting is top notch as you would expect with such a large talent pool. Jessica Alba is incredibly beautiful. Bruce Willis is amazing. My favorite however is Elijah Woods, the one you'll see with the mirrored glasses. Very courageous of him to agree to play this role. His character is unbelievably cool and he plays it well (without even saying a single word).
Final Rating: 3 and a half stars. It would have easily been 4 stars if it didn't gross me out so much, but I liked the plot, the look, and the overall "coolness" of the movie so much that I'll be seeing it again and pre-ordering it on DVD.