Review: Sin City

What can I say, this was a bad movie. The only thing worse than living in Sin City would be to live in a city that enjoyed Sin City.

The movie has no coherent narrative structure. The movie is organised around three stories that are VERY loosely related - they all passed through one bar. The characters are all bad, they differ only by degree.

The great thing about comics is that they develop very intricate characters with rich back stories. Of course comic series develop over years. Part of the challenge of puting comics on screen is to develop those characters in an hour or two. Sin City has three stories and three sets of charactres. It can't develop any of those characters except as caricatures. Consequently, the movie is a caricature. Cliches and rediculous lines get tossed about as easilly as the bullets and the whole thing is over the top.

Then, there is the violence. It takes a lot to get me to baulk at the violence. The violence was just extreme for the sake of extreme violence. There was nothing symbolic or purposeful in the violence except that it was demanded by the fact that these guys are all bad. All the violence got tiresome.

Of course there is the style. The style is not as original or great as people seem to think. Schindler's List effectively used well placed colour in a B&W film. But, as a comic based movie it does look and feel like a comic book. Comic books, however, are more than just entities that exist preserve a style their characters and stories are what sustain them - not style. Thus a movie like this that is all style and no substance is very much defective.

On the official Chris' Choice scale Sin City gets one star.
*