The movie was adapted from three of Miller's seven Sin City comic novels, and while the three stories are set in the same place at around the same time, they never quite overlap or interact, the stories do not come together at the end, and none of them are very involving, mostly since we never feel anything for any of the characters. They're fun to look at, but with no rooting interest or sense of building action I never felt involved.  I didn't check my watch during the film, largely because I don't own a watch, but I was frequently bored. If only a little bit.

To the scores.

Sin City (2005)
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 6
Humor: 3
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6

Whether or not you like this film will depend largely upon how much you love cinema. If the sheer visual spectacle and weird characters are enough for you, and you've got a strong stomach for horrendous violence, you will love this film. If you're squeamish and demand an involving plot narrative and rising action, you'll be sickened and bored. I fell in between those two extremes, though I was closer to love than hate.  I loved some of it but was bored by a lot of the rest, and as a result my review categories are all over the place.

Curious about other opinions, I checked out the critical masses. Most reviews are largely positive, and quite a few are raves, but of the ones I read, no one seemed to feel much like I did about the film. I eventually turned to Ebert's review, since he had a very similar opinion to mine about Rodriguez's last adult film, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Ebert liked it more than I did, but he basically agreed with my opinion that it was a film of many gorgeous images and clever scenes, but that there was no narrative discipline and no cohesive story. Which is pretty much what I thought of Sin City too. Ebert thought Sin City was different, though, hence his four star rating.

To quote an excerpt.

And now Rodriguez has found narrative discipline in the last place you might expect, by choosing to follow the Miller comic books almost literally. A graphic artist has no time or room for drifting. Every frame contributes, and the story marches from page to page in vivid action snapshots. "Sin City" could easily have looked as good as it does and still been a mess, if it were not for the energy of Miller's storytelling, which is not the standard chronological account of events, but more like a tabloid murder illuminated by flashbulbs.

I agree with everything he's saying here. The film does exercise "narrative discipline," in that it doesn't jump around all over the place like Rodriguez's past films. Unfortunately it's too disciplined in the way it stays rigidly with the same story from start to finish, (with one slight exception; the opening story continues after the other two, though you think it's over when they cut away from it half an hour into the film) and includes a lot of dead time. Picturesque dead time, but no matter how pretty it is, there's only so much staring at a static image you can do in a film without growing bored.

The stories are pretty trite, as well. In Sin City everyone is basically straight out of an adolescent fantasy world. All the men are dangerous lowlifes or psycho bad guys. All the male narrators are lone, brooding tough guys in a world of pain, men who are touched by one woman's kindness and then kill and crawl their way through fire to get revenge on those who would hurt her. The iconography and and imagery are powerful, but since these hero men spend most of their time alone, there's a lot of screen time given to them standing around, brooding and bleeding while they speak their thoughts courtesy of the extensive voice over narration.

Curious to compare, I looked through the sample pages of the Sin City comics on Amazon, and saw that 1) they really are virtually storyboards for the films, and 2) that 2/3 of the panels are almost entirely black ink, showing shadowy, film noir style images of the main characters and the beautiful dames they get involved with. It's all atmosphere and brooding darkness, since well... drawing things across a whole comic panel is a lot harder than drawing small things surrounded by tons of shadow. That style works (for most) in comic books since it's an accepted stylistic device, and since with a comic book the pacing is up to the reader. You can read slowly and soak up the atmosphere, or you can flip through the pages to get to the action. I tend to think comic books are way too light on plot and aren't worth the money since there are so many panels of stylistic pictures with nothing else. I'm not a big enough art fan to study how they are drawn, so I just want them to get on with the story, and when I read a graphic novel I tend to flip through it in about 5 minutes and wonder why on earth anyone would pay $27 for it.

I had somewhat the same reaction to Sin City, in that I liked the action bits, but often wanted to flip through the pages to get to more plot. There was no fast forward option in the theater though, which is why I was often bored by the pacing and style over substance. Unfortunately, it would be much the same on DVD, since it's not like there are long scenes that suck and can be skipped the way you do any scene with Bruce Willis' girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. The entire movie is just a bit bloated, with constant 5 and 10 and 15 second blocks of yawn time. Tighter editing could have cut 20 or 30 minutes off the movie and changed nothing, while making it a lot faster paced and I think I would have enjoyed it more.

Opinions on this will vary, of course, and I've seen some reviews talk about how the movie seemed incredibly fast-paced, and how 2 hours never felt more like 2 minutes, and how they wanted more and more of it.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention something about the violence, and while I didn't find it as gory or intense as lots of action movies, the events you see or hear referred to in Sin City are the most gruesome I have ever seen referenced in a mainstream film.  Evil men engage in dozens of child rapes and murders, enjoy cannibalism and mutilation, and behave sadistically towards every woman they can catch, and murder innocents with great glee. You don't see all of those things, but they are discussed very frankly or done just off-screen, and you see the aftermath, or the horror on the faces of those who suffer or witness the crimes. As punishment for their sins bad guys are squeezed to death, eviscerated, castrated, dismembered, fed to animals, beheaded, and on and on. Good guys are whipped, hung by the neck, electrocuted, shot, beaten, tortured, mangled, and much more, most of it right on camera.

These things aren't done in overly-sadistic fashion, and it's all very comic book and noir, but I don't think that Sin City is appropriate for children, or for quite a few adults, for that matter. I'd have loved it at about age 13, but I loved horror; the more gruesome the better.

I also liked that the violence was realistic, in it's pulpy, hyper-realistic way. When people get hit, or shot, or stabbed they bleed and they scream and they suffer. This might seem cruel or sadistic to some, and it is in a way, but at the same time it's realistic and sobering. When characters in movies are able to blow away dozens of bad guys who pop up like video game targets, and they go down with nary a scream or twitch or splash of blood (to preserve the PG-13 rating, most of the time), it's dehumanizing. In movies like those, there's no weight to the death, and no sense of suffering. At least in Sin City you see the pain such events bring about; it's not all cool and fun and harmless.

There's some sex too, but nothing explicit, unless you consider nudity a sin. There are several casually topless women and g-string butts on display, but it's not a big deal. I enjoyed the eye candy, while strongly approving of the realism of it. On several occasions a woman was lying naked in bed with the sheet down around her waist, and that was nice to see, just for the realism of it. It always seems so silly to me when movies or TV shows have a couple in bed with one of those L-shaped sheets; the kind that cover a woman up to her throat while leaving the man next to her naked above the waist. Most women aren't shy about their boobs being exposed when they are home alone, or with their lover, and the overt avoidance of nudity in much US entertainment always strikes me as very artificial. Especially when it's in a movie that's "R" rated already.

Sin City is completely over the top in its depictions of women, 95% of whom are imaginatively-dressed whores, but the men aren't much less ridiculous, though they are a lot more fully-clothed. If a movie had businesswomen walking around nearly naked for no particular reason, that would be dumb. In Sin City, it's how you expect the gun and sword-toting whores to dress, and it fits the mood perfectly, even though it's ridiculously objectifying. But hey, it's a comic book of a world like an adolescent's dark dream... what do you expect?

Hell, it's called Sin City... if you're looking for moral lessons, the title should tell you enough to send you elsewhere.