A brilliantly filmed horrible movie

Rating: 1/10 (11 April 2005)

Sin City breaks new ground in digital cinema. The aesthetics are riveting, lush, often gorgeous and breathtaking, ever attention getting. The movie is also horrible. It isn't horrible necessarily because of all the casual murders, tortures, beheadings, dismemberments, cannibalism . It isn't horrible because it it composed of three story lines crudely stitched together like Frankenstein's head. It is horrible because it depicts a world--this world?--where there is absolutely no possibility of progress, no possibility of justice, absolutely no hope. A world where suicide--literally suicide--is the only answer. it is breathtaking in its depressingly sick nihilism. In the old Holllywood studio system a studio head would have looked a this script and said, "Wait a minute..." and writers would have been brought in. This movie, however, did not have the benefit of that and will be proof to Holllywood and the rest of the literate world that technogeeks are more interested in developing yellow color that doesn't run against a blue background than in producing a script with rising and falling action, catharsis, just depressing muddle. In the movie theater I went to the audience filed out silent, lugubrious, with their heads down. I wanted to grab my $8.75 out of the till and run. Run like Hell was behind me.