Sin City (2005)

Big 'City' Blues: Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba star in
"Sin City" based on Frank Miller's graphic novels.

At one point in “Sin City”—director Robert Rodriguez's overlong, ostentatious but entertaining and highly stylized black and white comic book movie—one of the characters wanders into a church confession booth. “These hands of mine, they got blood all over ‘em,” he murmurs. “You're speaking figuratively,” the priest asks with a hint of trepidation. He's not.

Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novels of the same name, “Sin City” is an unapologetically bleak, bloody and violent anthology of pulpy tales featuring weary cops and jilted lovers, dangerous crooks and mean, sexy dames. They all prowl a dark, dreary urban landscape that looks like a chiaroscuro nightmare, complete with rainswept streets, hairpin curves and even a murky tar pit. It’s called Basin City, appropriately enough, because everything seems to be going down the drain.

It’s a place where villains are hideously immoral but the shady heroes aren't much better. And much like film noir—to which “Sin City,” movie or comic, owes substantial debt—the pop of gunfire rings out like dissonant music, eerie shadows seem to come alive, women are almost always bad news, and menacing evil lurks around every corner.

In the first story, we meet a jaded cop (Bruce Willis) with a heart condition trying to stay alive long enough to reach retirement. He tries to protect an 11-year-old girl from the mob but ends up in prison. When he emerges from the slammer eight years later, the same girl—now a curvy stripper played by Jessica Alba—nearly seduces him.

The next tale, the most entertaining in the film, is what might have happened if Moose Malloy and not Dick Powell had been the Raymond Chandler of Edward Dmytryk's classic 1944 noir, “Murder, My Sweet.” Looking like a distorted creature from one of Chester Gould’s comic strips, a morose, monstrously ugly hulk (Mickey Rourke) stalks the night in search of the party responsible for killing his girl, a hooker with a heart of gold named (what else?) Goldie.

Later, a good guy (Clive Owen) and a misogynist creep (Benicio Del Toro) stumble into another part of town where an army of street tough female prostitutes outfitted in slinky dominatrix gear viciously stand their ground during a deadly turf war. One of them, a beautiful Asian (Devon Aoki) with sword skills that would make Toshiro Mifune blush, slices her victims as if they were cold cuts in a deli.

There’s more but you get the idea. Lurching past two hours, the movie runs into excess—the story ponderously doubles back to tie up loose ends, killings are stretched out to the point of cliché, and stilted voiceovers ramble on forever (“Miho, you’re an angel…you’re saint…you’re Mother Teresa…you’re Elvis…”).

But at its best, “Sin City” is a dazzling visual medley of silvery black and white imagery flecked with just enough splashes of color—lurid red (for pints of blood), bilious yellow (for one especially execrable villain), and cool blue (for Alexis Bledel’s eyes)—to faithfully evoke the comic book world it borrows while adding cinematic style.

Sure, it’s pretentious and self-indulgent, but when the filmmakers are clearly having this much fun, you can't blame them for showboating.