Too much for me...

Rating: 3/10 (1 April 2005)

I went to "Sin City" expecting a slick film noir crackling with sharp dialogue and arresting black-and-white imagery. What I got was a monotonous slop of gore, fast cutting, cartoony action scenes, and lame one-liners that sound like Raymond Chandler's unused cast-offs. In other words, I wanted a Bogart movie, and what I got was a sicko movie. Tarantino and Rodriguez are, quite frankly, beginning to scare me.
I like violent stuff when it's well-done. Really, I do. "Night of the Living Dead" is a masterpiece. But that movie actually has proper characters and suspense and style. "Sin City" doesn't pause long enough to have suspense, a meaningful scene, or even a meaningful moment. The male protagonists are all interchangeable - grizzled guys with a penchant for helping fallen women - and the villains are all equally repulsive and dull. There are so many scenes of violent revenge-taking that the whole thing becomes tedious; I was never satisfied by the "payoffs" because I was never emotionally invested in the proceedings. The film is figuratively monotone, as well as literally.
And, needless to say, the treatment of women is repulsive.
Did I appreciate the style? Yeah, but it got old, like everything else. At the end of the day, this is nonsense. Come on - there's an evil guy who manages to regrow his penis, but it turns him yellow and rancid. That's not noir...that's not stylized...that's not interesting. It's gross and stupid. Like the whole movie, then.