Sin City

Bruce Willis plays a world-weary cop in Sin City.

(Herald rating: ****)

As you might have already read in these pages, Sin City is extremely faithful to its graphic novel origins.

Its star-studded digital black-and-white adaptation takes three of Frank Miller's stories and renders them, frame by frame, into a beautiful, brutally violent and bleakly funny film.

It's a film caught in its own pop culture loop. Miller's original work, influenced by everything from hard-boiled pulp fiction and film noir to kung fu movies, has been turned into a film using 21st-century technology to create an imaginary American underworld where time has stood still.

Rodriguez, who roped in Miller as co-director, risked having this become just another exercise in over-stylised digital wizardry, like the tedious Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. But Sin City still feels more like a movie than a cartoon, one driven as much by Rodriguez-Miller's monochrome vision and its interwoven stories, as by the actors, some of whom are required to deliver some of the oddest performances of their careers.

It turns Elijah Wood, the actor formerly known as Frodo, into a mute cannibal serial killer. It makes Mickey Rourke unrecognisable as Marv, a thug with a heart of gold and fists of steel. It transforms Bruce Willis into the world-weary cop to beat all his previous world-weary cops to a pulp. And it turns a year's worth of men's mag cover girls - Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy and others - into hookers and strippers.

Yes, the sexual politics of Sin City would seem to be a drawback. But then again, in Sin City the whores don't need pimps because they look after each other by any means necessary. And the folks who get really hurt, or worse, are invariably men who have mistreated, maimed or murdered women.

The film combines three of Miller's stories. In The Hard Goodbye Marv seeks revenge against the killer of the love-of-his-life hooker.

Then in That Yellow Bastard Willis' cop saves an 11-year-old girl from a paedophile (Nick Stahl), only to end up in jail instead of the perp.

When he gets out years later, the girl has grown up into a stripper (Jessica Alba) with adult feelings for her childhood saviour. But they find they are still threatened by her original attacker, who is not the man he once was.

And in The Big Fat Kill, the Sin City prostitutes, led by Gail (Rosario Dawson), try to avoid a turf war with the police, sparked by a confrontation between Dwight (Clive Owen) and corrupt cop Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro).

This chapter has scenes by "guest director" Quentin Tarantino and it's also the segment that stretches the patience the most.

Towards the end Sin City can start to numb the senses with its style, the repetition of its stories and increasingly imaginative violence. But on the whole Sin City is some piece of work.

No, it's not for everyone, but its sleazy, depraved, cynical and twisted world offers the year's darkest movie thrills yet.

CAST: Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Benicio Del Toro, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy. Nick Stahl
DIRECTOR: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
RATING: R18 (graphic violence)
RUNNING TIME: 125 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas from Thursday.