Looking at the amount of praise this film has received, I felt a need to dissect what I found to be an over the top, poorly conceived and adapted, clichéd, amoral, and fairly tedious film, which completely misuses the medium of film.

Firstly, I will happily concede that it wasn't all bad. The highly stylized imagery translated faithfully and almost directly from the comics is impressive, once you give yourself over to it, and in places is very effective. In addition to that Mickey Rourke's performance was a show stealer, reminding me what a good actor and very strange fellow he can be. There were moments that raised a smile too, such as the Henchmen that think they are intellectual and spout all manner of bizarre and absurd things. Even some of the endless violence grabbed my attention - although often for the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, any of these short lived moments of pleasure or interest were heavily outweighed by the negative points already mentioned.

As for the cast. It's an all star line up. Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Michael Madsen, Elijah Wood. Jessica Alba, Powers Boothe, to name but a few. I can only imagine that the green screens did little to inspire the their performances, except Rourke's (making it all the more impressive), while everyone else had the charisma of a basket of wet lettuces. It's not so much the fault of the actor but the limited material they have to work with, and seemingly large limitations due to the style.

While it is true to say that the consequences of evil actions in this film go severely punished, that doesn't automatically make it a voice of morality. Quite the opposite. Amongst the corruption, prostitution and brutality many of the most violent acts are committed by our so-called heroes, in a world where the ends justify the means. In fact, despite any attempts to show the downfall of evil people, the film gives an overall impression of not particularly caring either way, preferring to wallow in the graphic scenes themselves. Many films have covered similar stories, with anti-heroes of equally questionable nature, however it is the total lack of a moral framework in Sin City that makes it harder to stomach. It is true to say that many other films are equally as violent and some are just as bad or worse; I admit to enjoying numerous violent horror films. However, when the violence depicted is human on human I feel there is a need for justification and consequences to be shown. Simply applying an unreal style and a few superhero attributes to your leads doesn't alter the fact that these are stories with relevance to everybody's lives. Sin City's three story format gives us hardly anytime to actually get to know the characters, let alone look at the more complex reasons for violence and abuse. And given the grand nature of some of these tales the film would have been better served by only using two of them and focusing in on more detail. This serves only to highlight it's very shallow core