Noir for generation XYZ. In this Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller/Quentin Tarantino-tagalong, we get the urban squalor of a thousand post-war crime thrillers, all digitally rendered out in sprites and Photoshop layers and a fistful of crazy angles. Smudging three hard-boiled short stories with the bookends of a fourth (it seems), Miller's carnivorous page-tuner is stained with its own brand of scepticism.

In Sin City, everyone's out for cold blood; it's vigilantism burdened with the futility of purging one's sins, and considers vengeance – unlike the remainder of America's current revenge cinema – as something you pay for, no matter which side of the barrel you're on. Even Becky, the nubile blue-eyed belle who stools her femme fatale friends for the prospect of escaping it all, learns there's no way out when you choose to taketh away. Rodriguez and co. don't hold back when it comes to the killing/maiming/castrating, which is by in large the way graphic novels should translate to screen, and given that it's about time comic book do-gooders got the sex and violence makeover, the sight of Bruce Willis tearing the reproduction from Nick Stahl's in-betweens makes for some pretty fiendish viewing in the face of Hollywood's morally-righteous superhero.

Of course, it's this unsubtleness (not actually a word) that's perhaps the film's recipe for disaster: the dialogue's overcooked, the brutality's char-grilled, and the aesthetic's sliced and diced from the very first frame that by the time we're into round three, there's nothing left to bake from. You could argue that we're simply here to see pulp fiction four-dimensionalised; here to soak in the coarsest of sandpaper voiceovers; here to expect that nothing less than the exaggeration of exaggeration will cut it. And yet drop this material in the lap of Samuel Fuller or Nicholas Ray, and you just know there'd be a little less hyperbole, a lot less try-hard, and a whole lot more pathos. Sin City might be a video game for juvenile adults, but just try telling that to the kids juiced up on Max Payne and Grant Theft Auto sporting fake IDs (ushers: you have been warned).


ADDENDUM: Given the canned cynicism of the above, you'd think I would have already signed off on this. However allowing for a brief gestation period of two-to-three days, the film has actually grown on me since. Its appeal is still very much shackled to the insignificance of being an object, an illustration, nothing more, and Rodriguez isn't making any progress himself in the way of transcending Miller's material beyond the threshold of newsprint stained in blood. But clearly something's been interfering with my ability to enjoy cinema of late (wading through forty-odd festival films and having to apply some sort of critical discourse to each of them being one culprit), and don't ask me how, but it took a film modelled on the heinous logic of San Andreas to break the trance.

On a purely aesthetic level, there's no reason why Sin City can't be flung on a coffee table and thumbed through at leisure without any sort of consequence because, well, it's just a comic book movie. Even considering its pungent masculinity, territorial violence and ambivalence towards revenge (my initial reading of complicity gave way to the belief that this is all merely killing for the sake of), some films just simply don't allow for critical baggage to get in the way of a good time, especially when it consists of bustin' caps and breakin' limbs. I was mixed about Fruit Chan's Dumplings too, but like that film, I can appreciate the perverse, the obscene, or the downright gratuitous when it straddles that dark realm between guilt and pleasure. Also, according to those more in the know, the Josh Harnett character is a gun-for-hire; not the protagonist of a so-called "fourth" chapter (as I previously noted) that begins and ends the film.—Tim Wong

» Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller/Quentin Tarantino | USA | 2005