It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying, sometimes that means killing a whole lot of people.

Sin City is depraved, disturbing, and ultra-stylized. This isn't a comic book movie, it's more like a live action comic book. Seriously, when I think back on it I feel like I watched a cartoon, except I know real people were in it.

Before I talk about how great I thought this movie was, I'll cover some ground rules. This movie has zero moral redeeming values and it ultra violent. You'll witness gunshots, blood splatters, cannibalism, and lots of creative ways to remove body parts (amputations, decapitations and castrations - yes, plural on all of those.) And you're not really dealing with nice people. The women in the movie are: a parole officer who spends most of her screen time naked, a flirty barmaid, a stripper, a whole load of prostitutes with guns, and one woman with an unknown background who is quickly killed by a hitman. I guess there's a judge, but she doesn't actually have any dialog. The men's side is only slightly better - probably because they're the protagonists. One of them is a cop who is actually a good guy. The other two almost manage to convince you they're good and not ex-con murderous torturers. After you move away from the protagonists things get really ugly: hit men, gang thugs, cannibals, murderers, crooked cops, psychotic serial killers, and child rapists - you know, the kind of people you'd like to have over for dinner.

But if you don't mind the violence and depravity you're in for a treat. Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels have a fantastic and original visual look. The gritty, vicious content is paired with a stark black and white style full of strong lines and extreme contrast. The film completely embodies this style. You have never seen a movie that looks like this. It's just amazing. The way the whole movie just feels like someone took the books and didn't reimage them into a movie, they just mutated them. It's unreal.

The last two paragraphs work together very well for the movie. The visual style paired with extreme archetypes for characters means none of them actually feel real. So when they do crazy violent things, those don't feel real. There's no real connection to the people bad things are happening to, which makes those bad things not quite so horrifying.

I'm a big fan of the Sin City books. Their uncompromising style and content is just fun. Sure, it's vacuous - but there's something to the storyline. It's all tragic, flawed figures who find themselves in bad situations, pick a path to get out of it, and head straight down that path killing anyone who gets in the way. This movie isn't for everyone, but it's brilliant.


Note:
As you can imagine this movie has a lot of geek appeal. I went to see it at The Cinerama on opening night and you could really tell this wasn't your typical movie audience. For example, there was much cheering for a Star Wars trailer (only the hard core geeks still cheer for those, most of us have forsaken Lucas by now.) But that paled in comparison to the roar let out for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer (which was excellent and makes me really look forward to it's opening later this month.) It was good to be back with my own kind - a theater packed with movie geeks!

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