If only looks could thrill

Sin City is a virtuoso piece of film-making. Robert Rodriguez has translated writer- artist Frank Miller's superhero comics to the screen with an ingenuity, and accuracy, that has to be wondered at.

The cast is manoeuvred around some brilliant computer-generated artwork, rather than traditional sets, the black-and-white photography illuminated by splashes of lurid colour. Miller's heavily stylised fantasy world, which draws partly on film noir and partly on cyber-punk science-fiction, seems to have
been torn directly from the books.

If looks could kill, Sin City would be a masterpiece. But it isn't, not only because it is far too long and repetitive, but because it leaves a brackish taste in the mouth. This city is not just a heavily pointed-up version of Raymond Chandler's mean urban streets or Mickey Spillane's amoral pulp novels, it is a hellish metropolis that encourages the kind of leering violence, admittedly fantastic and at times dreamlike, that in the end palls.

The three hard-boiled heroes, faced by depraved villains, survive a thousand cuts, and dish out dozens more, to protect the garish whores who mostly approximate women.

The only major female who isn't a sex worker is Marv's probation officer, a lesbian with strange underclothes who gets her hand eaten by a cannibal. Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Alexis Badel and Jaime King have a hard row to hoe.

The male heroes are a tough trio: the first is Hartigan (Bruce Willis), an honest but sickly and possibly dying cop; ex-con Marv (Mickey Rourke), festooned in prosthetics so you hardly recognise him; and Dwight (Clive Owen), a fugitive with a face changed by plastic surgery. Together, these hard men torture, kill and mutilate as painfully as possible.

No, Miller's world is not a feelgood one. Pet wolves eat people, gun hands are chopped off, testicles are blown away, heads are severed and fingers forcibly removed. There is no end to the butchery, and it comes as a relief when guest director Quentin Tarantino contributes an ironic scene in which Owen drives around the city with Benicio Del Toro's talking corpse - at least there's a bit of a script to listen to.

Rodriguez, who made the excellent El Mariachi and the awful From Dusk Till Dawn, makes no attempt to justify the carnage with any kind of depth. Never mind that, he seems to say, feel the width. But it's the width that scuppers Sin City, and the lack of any redeeming, let alone moral, conclusions.

Sin City
Cert: 18