sincity.jpgIt’s an action movie - no it’s a comic book - no it’s BOTH! This unique motion picture can best be described as ‘graphically orchestrated surrealistic sex and violence.’ Thoroughly enjoyable. Kid stuff that’s not for kids. I give it 4¾ out of 5 stars.

A-list action stars rub shoulders with snaky villains and sexy wenches, in a city where the streets are always wet, the cars are ragtops and everybody smokes. It’s a black-and-white world, except for blood, which is red, eyes which are green, hair which is blond, and the Yellow Bastard.

This isn’t an adaptation of a comic book, it’s like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map.

The movie is not about narrative but about style. It internalizes the harsh world of the Frank Miller “Sin City” comic books and processes it through computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid costumes and dialogue that chops at the language of noir. The actors are mined for the archetypes they contain; Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. We get not so much their presence as their essence; the movie is not about what the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest dreams.

Credit Roger Ebert for the review. Credit IMDB for the cover picture.