I have to admit, shaming as it is to me as a [Comic Book Geek|text|CBG], I haven’t read Sin City. I’ve seen a few pages, enough to recognize the style if I bump into it in an alley, but that’s all; so this review comes from a place of even greater ignorance than most of my comic book rants. My only bits of Frank Miller knowledge are Dark Knight Returns and the many-splendored Batman: Year One. (I skipped Dark Knight Two. Call me crazy, but if I want to see Superman and Wonder Woman having rough sex for two issues…oh wait, I never want to see that!)

From the little I’ve seen, Frank Miller is in love with noir, and Sin City seems to be his most masterful sonnet. It explores not only the tropes and trappings, but the ambiguous heart of the genre. What’s the difference between a hero and a villain? That we’re rooting for one and not the other? That the reason he does the same horrible things is a ‘better’, nobler one?

The movie Sin City is built from three stories, with an interlocking supporting cast and three her—er, protagonists. Each story explores the same theme; how men try to protect women; how they can, how they can’t, and how they shouldn’t. Based on my first sensing of this theme, and the general time period, the genre, and, frankly, my limited exposure to Frank Miller, I was expecting to have to dial my ‘Feminist Sensitivity’ control down a great deal. However, the female characters were varied not only in personality but in ability, and I wasn’t left with a sour taste in my mouth. There’s a great deal of cheesecake, but if I hadn’t learned to cope with that, I would have dropped comic books long ago.

The movie is engaging and very fast-paced; you’re swept along by the emotional drives and urgency of the characters. It is, as you will likely hear, bloody. But it isn’t the fetishized violence of Kill Bill or even Once Upon a Time in Mexico; as an NPR critic noted, the blood is rarely red; it’s usually white or black…it isn’t a splash of visceral revulsion, it’s a part of the story, a paint in the palette. The violence is a second soundtrack, pulsing and present, moving you along. You aren’t encouraged to either judge or agree with the horrible things some of the protagonists are doing, merely to recognize them and, perhaps, their inevitability.

The acting was excellent; almost stylized - voices roughened, delivery taken just to the edge of ‘too much’ but not beyond. It’s hard to talk about specifics like acting or shots, because everything in the movie was so interwoven. The acting, the makeup, the lighting, the sets - they bleed into each other. Seldom, perhaps never, have I seen a movie that seemed so seamless, as if every aspect of it were an expression of the same mind and intent. Maybe that’s what you get when you let a writer/artist co-direct a movie of his own work.

Oh, and when we walked out of the movie, wonko (who chronicles his revulsion from his fellow man and his adoration of this movie here) said, “Hard to believe most of that was shot on green screen, isn’t it?” Well, ladies and gents, I couldn’t tell. Maybe my disbelief is a particularly advanced suspension bridge, but it never crossed my mind to question the reality placed in front of me for a moment. Beautiful.

Bottom Line: 10 out of 10. A gorgeous, engrossing movie with all the trimmings, from titles to soundtrack, perfect. If you can’t hack violence or blood, or require your heroes to be squeaky clean, you might want to avoid it. Otherwise, it’s a fabulous movie, and you have no excuse not to see it.