Proves why fidelity to the source material is not always a good quality in movie adaptations

Rating: 4/10 (12 October 2010)

If what you want is something relentlessly faithful to the source material, Sin City is THE movie for you. If what you want is a good film, Sin City is an amateurish mess.
Based on the comic books by Frank Miller and yes, most of them are comic books not graphic novels, this movie takes three Sin City tales and compresses them into one interwoven film. Mickey Rourke is Marv, a superhumanly tough thug out to avenge the death of a beautiful woman murdered next to him in bed. Bruce Willis is Hartigan, a superhumanly tough senior citizen cop out to protect a beautiful girl from the sick bastard who wants to kill her. Clive Owen is Dwight, a superhumanly tough guy hiding from his past and out to protect beautiful prostitutes from a rogue cop named Jack Rafferty (Benicio Del Toro) and the mob that wants to bring the women back into their control. If you're noticing a bit of similarity between those three stories, you're on the right track.
What's good -
Dwight having an imaginary conversation with a corpse in a car, Mickey Rourke as Marv and a topless Carla Gugino.
What's bad -
The dialog is painfully stilted and stifling. Words that burn the page when linked to a single image weigh the film down like lead when spoken by actors in real-time. It's like a Shakespeare play where the characters give these long speeches and the actors have to figure out what to do while they keep talking. But while the rhythm of the Bard's words gives the actors something to hang their performances on, the repetitive Spillane-speak of Sin City traps the actors amber.
Color is splashed haphazardly throughout the film, to the point that when you finally get to That Yellow Bastard...instead of being a disturbingly creepy image, he's just another theatrical effect. Maybe there was some design to the way color was used, but I can't detect it and it all just becomes distracting with usually no reason why something is in color or why it shifts from black-and-white to rainbow and back.
Cramming several Sin City stories together also highlights the sameness of the adolescent nihilism that runs through them. The one note that Miller played so beautifully in the books is pounded into your brain over and over again.
I call it an amateurish mess, even with the talent and skill of Rodriguez and Tarantino, because just as some comic creators today refuse to utilize the full capabilities of the word and picture, Sin City abandons or rejects some of the basic things a motion picture can do. Comic and Film are two different mediums and you cannot tell the same story in each in the exact same way.
It is very visually stylized, and if that's your thing it might make up for the storytelling weaknesses of the film. If not, you'll come away wondering what all the fuss is about.
I may be a little too hard on Sin City, the movie. It may be fine as an abnormally violent, visually indulgent crime picture. But because it is almost a literal translation, it ends up being nothing like the cinematic equivalent of Miller's brilliant work.