Sin city

What can you say about a movie where someone rips out another man's balls with his own hands? Fucking awesome, that’s what you say. The eunuch's head is then pounded into jelly... oh, bliss.

Stylish, exciting and relentlessly violent, Sin City follows three vaguely interlocking stories set in the same city. A cop battles a serial rapist/killer (and the web of corruption that protects him), a thug goes on a bloody rampage to resolve the murder of a whore, and an assassin gets involved in a war between a confederation of bitches and the forces of pimpdom. The movie oozes blood and testosterone, and proudly exists in a realm completely separate from reality.
The aesthetic is that of classic 40s noir movies, but modern sport cars race the streets. The men are heroic, doomed forces of nature, and women are firmly in the background as plot devices. A brawler can hit someone and send him flying ten meters, and wire-fu is relegated to a despicable assassin. A shot to the head is only an inconvenience, and someone can jump down three stories to skip the stairs- because, you know, he's so fucking macho, that his three-feet diameter titanium balls will break the fall (and possibly the pavement).

And you know what? All of this doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. In boldly going forward with an almost surrealistic visual design, it not only manages to lovingly recreate the source material (in the best translation of comic aesthetics to the screen you are likely to see short of full-out animation), but also makes all the weirdness easier to accept. In throwing away all restrictions, the directors are free to pursue the essence of pulp/noir, and get damn near to it. It's such a pure representation of the genre, that it looks completely new... and that is something worth celebrating in itself.

Just about the only criticism that can I can make on this movie is that after Merv's story is done, anything else can only go downhill- but that's more praise than criticism. From the very beginning, the dry, slghtly ridiculous noir-y voiceover hits the perfect note. Minutes later, you see Bruce Willis 'drive' a car: his hands move the steering wheel whithout any correlation to the superimposed road receding in the background. Right about then, five minutes into the movie, you know you're in for a treat.
And Rodriguez, Miller and Co. never disappoint.