Ever get the feeling you're being watched by a half-naked cowgirl?

HAMSTER RATING

Based on ‘Sin City’ comics by Frank Miller

Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, with additional work by Quentin Tarantino

Produced by Robert Rodriguez and Harvey and Bob Weinstein

Rated ‘R’ for extreme simulated violence, nudity and sexual situations

Welcome to Sin City. [Note: You’re not welcome. But don’t feel bad – neither are the people who live here.]

Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s black-and-white neo-noir journey to the edge of the R-rating is little more than a vulgar, sickening, pitiless, blatantly sexist 2 ½ hour gore-fest. The writing is inane, the characters are unbelievable, and in the end, it offers little to no redeeming moral message. And thank God for it – improve even one of those elements, and this amazing soon-to-be-cult-classic wouldn’t work at all.

As far as plot is concerned, things are rather simple. Sin City follows the extraordinarily brutal lives of three very unfortunate citizens of fictional Basin City. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is an aging cop on a quest to save a young woman from a homicidal maniac. Marv (Mickey Rourke) is a seemingly unstoppable thug out to avenge the death of his favorite hooker. Dwight (Clive Owen) is a wandering vagabond who finds himself entangled in a potentially devastating turf war between rival gangs. As the three stories loosely intertwine (emphasis on loosely – all but the end of Hartigan’s story takes place nearly a decade before the other two), we get an insiders’ glimpse of a world God clearly abandoned, and Satan himself found too unruly to manage. Cars collide on rainy streets, heads are smashed into juicy pulp, and several men…uh, permanently lose the ability to produce offspring, before Hartigan, Marv and Dwight find satisfaction. I won’t give the ending away, but be warned: things don’t exactly wrap up nicely for two of the three technical protagonists.

"Is there a problem, Mr. Health Inspector?"

Don’t misread that. A strong sense of justice underlies this movie, and the producers are faithful to it to the end. But as in real life, heroics aren’t always rewarded with medals and parades. In other words, don’t expect a sun-drenched triple-wedding finale.

So Sin City isn’t the feel-good movie of the year (unless you get creator Frank Miller’s vibe, in which case it just might be. But most won’t, so…). Just because it’s dark, however, doesn’t mean it’s depressing. Yes, it’s almost entirely black-and-white (color is used sparingly for emphasis); yes, it’s noir-ish, which means it’s always night, usually raining, and everyone is perpetually cheesed-off; yes, Marv is one of the physically ugliest characters ever to defile a screen, and has a penchant for sadistically torturing his victims. Despite all this (and a lot more!), Sin City plays almost entirely like a black comedy. The violence is so outlandish, the characters so terrible, that you quickly realize that these are not real, sympathetic characters, buffeted by a world they never made. They’re simply Frank Miller’s dirty live-action cartoons. They have been thrown, like Warner Bros.’ Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam, into their present circumstances, so that we can watch amused as they take repeated lickings and keep on ticking. It’s funny when Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff, because you know he’ll be back, alive and whole and plotting again, in the next scene. In the same way it’s funny to see Hartigan get shot 12 times in the chest, Marv get beaten to mush, Dwight drive head-long into a seething tar-pit. They’ll be back shortly, perhaps a little worse for wear, perhaps throbbing with a heightened degree of rage, but they’ll be back. Probably only to be squeezed through the ringer again. But you can be sure, it’ll be funny the next time, too.

Admittedly, the brutality loses most of its shock and/or humor by the final third of the movie. It starts to seem a chore for the exhausted characters to keep up the head-smashing and throat-slicing, and around the same time the exhausted audience finds it a chore to watch them go on and on. A 2 ½ hour movie is never a picnic to sit straight through, especially when it’s all gore and harsh lighting. Maybe Rodriguez should have brought back the classical intermission for this misadventure – a ten-minute breather at the hour-fifteen mark would have been enough to refresh the audience for the second round.

After a hard day's worth of revenge and torture, Marv likes to unwind with the smooth, bold flavor of Camel Unfiltered Cigarettes.

Any other complaints I have about this artistic exercise in nausea-induction are minor. While the star-studded cast on the whole is phenomenal (Bruce Willis plays himself again, but he’s just so good at it!), there are some problems with the female contingent. Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy and Alexis Bledel sure are purty, but haven’t been out of the Flavor of the Month Club long enough yet to take their characters where Miller clearly wants them to go. The operative word here is ‘staid’, or maybe ‘mechanical’. Maybe it has something to do with Miller’s over-the-top noirish dialogue, which seems at times more a savage Humphrey Bogart tribute instead of what might actually spring from the lips of such a diverse body of characters.

The other issue here is Sin City’s similarity to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Tarantino actually ‘guest directs’ (whatever the bleep that means) a scene in this movie. Perhaps as a result of his proximity to the film, or his proximity to friend Rodriguez, Sin City borrows heavily from the gory cult classic. This borrowing includes Bruce Willis himself as another soft-hearted tough-guy, a pair of talkative minor thugs with car troubles, and the Tarantino-supervised scene itself, ‘Rush-Body-with-Massive-Headwound-in-Car-to-Place-of-Disposal-Before-the-Pigs-Catch-You’. To those unfamiliar with Pulp Fiction…well, you need to get your butt over to Blockbuster and rent it, a.s.a.p. To those who are familiar, you’ve seen some of this stuff before, and done better. Originality here comes in the production design. The plot(s) and characters, while intriguing, are basically a delivery system for the stunning visuals. Of course, this is a movie based on a graphic novel, so that’s kinda the point.

Sin City is an excellent addition to the growing neo-noir family, to be sure. It’s definitely the pretty one. But at its core, it’s a hard-R action movie – highly deranged, and a bit clumsy at times in the writing/acting department. It isn’t going to change lives, or start any new movements. Except, maybe, one to produce better comic-book movies. Though with Universal squeezing Marvel for all its worth, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

And lo, the angel spake unto them, saying, "I'm not an angel, you morons! I'm just a hooker with shiny hair!"

At last analysis, Sin City is sort of like the inhabitants of Basin City themselves: easy on the eyes, good for a laugh, but better held at arms’ length. After all, you gotta watch that splashing phosphorescent blood. Like Marv says, that stuff will ruin your jacket.