The first time I saw Sin City, I had stayed up the whole night before and couldn’t keep my eyes open. I nodded in and out of sleep throughout the whole movie, catching only glimpses here and there and even then only in a state of heavy drowsiness. I can tell you that this is one weird, freaking movie when you’re semi-conscious. My memories of it were all as a dream – and a crazy, messed up nightmare at that.

To my surprise, the second time I saw it, the movie wasn’t much different. Sin City, I discovered, IS a crazy messed up nightmare.

Based on Frank Miller’s comic of the same name, Sin City leads us through the dark, dystopic world of Basin City, where priests and government leaders are the arch villains and prostitutes govern themselves. All is depicted for us in a stark black and white, with computer graphics creating impossible lighting effects and splashes of color. CG also brings us impossible camera shorts and effects. Sin City has taken us into a new world of filmmaking – and it’s an amazing sight to see.

The noir look and feel captures the tone of the city dredges and we become fully absorbed in this very real – yet wholly surreal – world. As if a series of comics, Sin City provides us with three distinct, yet slightly interrelated, stories. One involves Hartigan (Bruce Willis) as he tries to preserve the life of young Nancy (Jessica Alba). Another follows Marv’s (Mickey Rourke) attempts to get revenge on the mysterious Kevin (Elijah Wood) for the killing of a prostitute (Jamie King) he had fallen in love with. The third story follows Dwight (Clive Owen) as he tracks down Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) and then deals with the consequences of it.

The three leading men are flawed but each seeking a greater good of some form in the midst of the chaos. Each story involves, to one degree or another, an attempt to correct the ills of the world while recognizing their own fallen state. Yet Sin City has nothing truly impressive to tell us. It is, in the end, just fanboy fiction with dark tales of sinister deeds that provide something cool to look at. Sin City tells us nothing significant about the nature of sin except, of course, that its extremes can get awful dirty.

Sin City works with a frequent voiceover that mimics the interior dialogue expressed in a comic book. It's quite fun at times, but at others it’s stretched too far. There’s a reason voiceover isn’t used often for interior dialogue in film. But Sin City is willing to take risks in bringing the comic book to screen and it succeeds. For all the comic book films of late, Sin City is the perhaps best at portraying the art of the comic book to date.

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