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Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2009)

First things first : this film is extraordinarily violent, without there being any sane reason whatsoever for it to be so. It can safely be classified as comic-book gore porn. While watching it, there were at least a dozen occasions when I wanted to hit the 'eject' button on my DVD player ; the only thing that kept me going was simply that I wanted to get it over with.
Is this what art has come to in this age ? Were the filmmakers so desensitized that they went to these levels of harrowing cruelty to titillate their audience ? And just why is this film so chock full of celebrities for roles that a C-List actor would avoid ? Elijah Wood plays something like the ultimate misogynist-cum-cannibal......eh ? That being done with, Sin City is still highly remarkable for its novel and sophisticated filming style. The film was shot on a digital backlot, first in color, which was then converted to high-grade black-and-white, and then desaturated to give it a high contrast. Colour is added in interesting places, like all the girls' eyes, lips, hair, apparel.....you get the point. Oh yeah, and the barrels and barrels of fake blood used here was accentuated to a deep dark red. I also liked how they used CGI only as and when necessary, so the film looks like a cross between a very real and a completely fictional world.
Maybe the film's only true saving grace is that unlike Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, it doesn't even try passing off as high art ; the film is perfectly aware of itself as being simply low-brow violence for violence's sake, and nothing more. Let me tell you that if you haven't seen this film, save yourself the trouble, you're not missing much. Give your time to something more worthy of it. This film isn't half as clever or funny as it would like to be, and just because a film goes into places with violence that other films don't DOES NOT make it revolutionary or original. It doesn't even matter that Rodriguez supposedly "stayed true" to the source material, since the "source" in question is jarringly stupid to begin with. This film will most certainly appeal to rapists and women beaters, so if you liked this hunk of sado junk, well......
A friend of mine called Sin City "misogynistic crap". She's perfectly right. Armond White of the NY Press called Oldboy a "virtuosic stupid movie". Now THAT is clever, and funny too, and what's more, that phrase is even more true for Sin City.