Rarely a week goes by without the arrival of a comic adaptation promising to be the darkest, edgiest yet. Well, oh boy, do we have a winner. Sin City is drawn from the hard-boiled graphic-nasties of Frank Miller, who co-directed the movie with Robert Rodriguez (and received further assistance from Mr. Quentin Tarantino). Maintaining a grovelling S&M slave-dog obedience to the source material, their collective efforts prove every bit as brilliantly, imaginatively, gruesomely violent as one would have suspected.
Indeed, watching Sin City’s diseased Gothamite monochrome (with occasional Brechtian splashes of colour for emphasis) and snarling bondage beauties, and listening to the damned protagonists trade rock hard-boiled barbs with the film’s perverted villainous grotesques, it becomes clear that this is less an adaptation than a straight jump between mediums. But for voiceover where thought bubbles should be, you’d be inclined to believe they just ripped out the pages and animated them as if with a flip-book; and by utilising a virtual set, that’s essentially what Rodriguez et al have done.
As with last year’s Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, there’s a sense of a noble and circular lineage in the CGI pastiche – Fleishman and contemporaries feed on film noir for the superhero comics of the ‘40s, in turn inspiring the darksome oeuvre of Miller, Wolfman and Sienkiewicz during the ‘80s. Now Miller throws it all back up on the screen as something unique and beautiful, yet bastardised. It’s neo-post-post-noir, or something in that academic neighbourhood.
Unlike the dazzling but empty-headed Sky Captain, however, Sin City isn’t merely CGI fur coat and no knickers. Not that anyone in their right mind could describe Rodriguez and Miller’s efforts as deep. Any film heightened and hyper-real enough to use yellow and green blood geysers or make featherweights such as Brittany Murphy and Jaime King look accomplished is not going for profundity.
Rather, this majestically sleazy exercise seduces and throttles with claustrophobic atmosphere and down and dirty back-street technique; it’s compellingly cynical car-crash depiction of humanity – or some twisted relation – grants the same perverse pleasures as a Jim Thompson reading binge with added grand guignol and depravity.
In Sin City, even the angels are hookers, yet bizarrely, there’s no shortage of chivalrous knights. In three loosely interlocking stories – taken from the graphic novels The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard – there’s nothing like a dame to inspire vengeance and massacres. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is the sinkhole’s Last Good Cop attempting to rescue a little girl from a repugnant paedophile (Stahl); Dwight (Owen) is a surgically reconstructed private eye attempting to cover for his sometime dominatrix lover (Dawson) and Marv (Rourke, who steals the entire picture) is the killing-machine psycho who doubles as the movie’s moral centre.
The tripartite structure and blustering amorality (even little Frodo is a cannibalistic monster), coupled with the presence of Quentin T. (who ‘guest-directs’ the liveliest section of dialogue – an hallucinated conversation between Clive Owen and a dead Benicio Del Toro) is sure to invite facile comparison with Pulp Fiction, but in common with that film, Sin City is simply like nothing you‘ve ever seen. Indeed, not since Touch Of Evil has any work replicated the sensation that you’re watching from the gutter quite like this one. We’re so there.

Running Time 124mins. Cert 18. Opens June 3rd

Read an interview with Sin City star Jessica Alba here