While it's probably a total cliche to say it by now, Sin City really is a wild thrill ride of a movie, and quite possibly the most entertaining thing that will hit theaters all year. Adapted by director Robert Rodriguez from Frank Miller's graphic-novel series, it's an energetic slab of neo-noir, complete with twisted characters, ambiguous morality, and deadly serious dialogue. For those who thought the Kill Bill movies weren't bizarre or violent enough, Sin City ought to seem like a stylish, action-packed gift from guy-movie heaven. It's filled with negativity, outrageously over the-top bloodletting, and some of the blackest humor known to man, but it all works anyway. I even managed to forgive the incessant voice-over narration, normally a rather lazy device, because it's so oddly poignant and poetic. It's not really that big a deal anyway, because this movie is so impressive visually that the characters could speak in gibberish and I'd probably still be moved to give it at least three stars.
As everyone (and probably their brothers) knows by now, Sin City was filmed using real actors against a black-and-white CGI background with some touches of color added for dramatic effect. It may seem like a gimmick at first, but Sin City is all about bringing the viewer into a sort of parallel universe, so this unconventional device works perfectly. Sin City is a movie dealing with lives on the edge, and it conjures up a delightfully dark, grimy, and gritty atmosphere to go match the depravity of its subject matter. Weighty themes and over-the-top violence abound here, and it's only fitting that the movie's look and feel should be so uniformly haunting. Consisting of three tangentially related stories occurring out of sequence, Sin City brings the viewer into an underworld populated by thieves, murderers, hookers, and dirty cops, and the morality is viewed entirely in shades of grey. In the Basin City of the movie, where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are even worse, violence is often a virtue, or at the very least a prerequisite for survival. If there's one redeeming value to Sin City's cartoonish ultraviolence, it's that it's painfully clear that its recipients generally deserve it.
Now, although I've gone on too long already, I'd feel remiss if I didn't talk about Sin City's staggering violence quotient. Yes, this an extremely graphic movie, and much of the violence is downright disturbing to watch (Elijah Wood's character being cut up and fed to a wolf is a prominent example, even if much of the violence in that case was implied), but it's just as true that context is an important factor when considering just how offensive such bloodletting is. Now, for one thing, Sin City is meant to be a piece of escapist cinema, so nothing that takes place onscreen should be taken too seriously anyway. After all, no one got offended during the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur cut off the Black Knight's arms and legs; that scene was meant to be funny and it was. Perhaps more to the point, the violence here is so ludicrously over the top from the opening scene that it's hard to imagine any rational person getting too upset. You have to just go with it; if you're the kind of person who makes it a point to be huffy and offended all the time you shouldn't be seeing this movie anyway.