"Sin City" is a spectacularly great, tremendous movie that was predictably too subtle and brilliant for American film critics to understand. You can tell right in their reviews that the vast majority of them watched the movie with a yawn; found themselves vaguely troubled by some nagging sensation the movie provoked that they didn't understand; and then simply dismissed their feeling and wrote their reviews as if "Sin City" were just another piece of comic book trash like "The Fantastic 4."

If you go to www.rottentomatoes.com and click on the reviews, you actually feel embarrassed for these poor idiotic souls who write such telling confessions of their inadequacy and publish them unknowing in major newspapers all across the country.

It isn't that "Sin City" was poorly reviewed. On the contrary, it got many good reviews. But the problem is that most critics seemed to dismiss it as a silly thrill ride, and completely overlooked the brilliance of Frank Miller's writing. In a Hollywood controlled world in which the people speak in stilted, paint-by-numbers dialogue, it is truly refreshing to hear something that aspires to poetry, even if it is just to mock the whole genre.

The biggest complaint I have heard from critics and average fans is that "Sin City" is disjointed because of the fact that it follows three separate stories. God, this one pisses me off....Look, just because every other Hollywood movie follows an eight step sequence in which a defined set of items must occur doesn't mean that's the one true format that all movies must bow down to in order to be of high quality. The average moviegoer has been so engrained with this format that they just don't know what to make of a film that doesn't slip into the well worn wagon-tracks in their mind. This is brainwashing, and all it does is keep people from exploring ideas that they otherwise might have engaged.

"Sin City" probably could have been reworked to follow the typical Hollywood format, the stories could have been inter-cut so that the action went from one of them to the other and then back again, but that would have disrupted the brilliance of Frank Miller's writing. He published those stories as complete segments and if you watch them develop, they're textbook examples of how to write a compelling short story. Why would you destroy that for the sake of some idiotic filmatic paradigm that has been done to death and stained with shit?

The average idiotic person watches "Sin City" and gets confused by the fact that the movie jumps all through space and time. Well, fuck them, the whole goddamned point of the movie is that the characters and their trials are just meant to illustrate a larger theme. It's the larger theme that provides the coherence that the 8 segment plan is supposed to achieve. If you need something to grasp onto to enjoy the movie, grab onto that.

I really hate it when people get all goddamned pretentious and watch something like "Sin City" with a dismissive attitude. Some people have the idea that anytime excessive violence or blood is used in a film that is a sign of second-rate quality or poor story telling ability. Ironically enough, this is exactly what the authors of the most successful book of all time decided to use...that being the Holy Bible, and these same pretentious fucks who like to get all self-righteous in their denial of violent works never turn around and attack the king bee of needless representations of horrific torture and violence.

Get over it! Violence is a tool, just like sex, just like black and white or color, it expresses an idea that is commonly found in the human experience and provides catharsis. That's a good thing.

And "Sin City" provides a hell of a lot of catharsis, which is great because if there's one thing I need, it's a little catharsis. It's awesome to see Marv torturing some horrible assassin, murderer cannibal with a treatment that is actually reflective of the anguish and pain that his victim probably inflicted on the world. Dante did the same damn thing, but nobody dismisses the "Inferno" the way they dismiss something like "Sin City." Fucking bastard hypocrite fucks.

They're dismissing the movie before they ever even get a chance to get to the themes, and as dirty and horrific as many of the scenes of the movie are, the themes are actually quite interesting.

"Sin City" is this corrupt, horrible place where the criminals are bad and the police are worse. No body of authority be it the church, or the courts of law is free of corruption, and every single one of them does whatever it can to forward their own ends at whatever cost they need to inflict. Corruption is the disease that society lives with, and those that chose to fight it, be they police or criminal, do so at a terrible price to themselves.

"Once you get people to go along with something they know in their own heart not to be true, then you've got them by the balls!" Says the evil senator whose son likes to rape little girls. And yeah, this is a pretty much true sentiment that has a fairly strong foothold in the modern world.

After the "lady in red" assassination sequence, the movie goes into the story of Hartigan played by Bruce Willis. The situation that confronts him is that some dipshit Senator's son has abducted a little girl and is going to rape her. Hartigan knows exactly where the pervert and the little girl are, but his partner refuses to assist him in the rescue. He tells Hartigan to wait for backup, knowing full well that this is just the way that things are done, it really means the police are going to allow the little girl to be raped because, in one way or another, the Senator is their boss.

Hartigan's partner reminds Hartigan that he knows how things are done, and you, the audience, understand that Hartigan has allowed other things to slide in the name of the bureaucracy. It was probably just turning his head and watching somebody take a bribe, or watching somebody get roughed up...little digressions from the system of morality that the police supposedly aspire to and claim to enforce. He probably justified it to himself by saying that things are more complicated in reality than in fairy tales. But this issue with the kid being raped is too much. This is clearly outside the lines, and Hartigan has come to accept that the system actually is flawed and evil and that he must do whatever he can to stop it.

This is the key realization of the movie, because every character eventually makes the decision to do the right thing no matter what the horrific consequences are to themselves. They fight a system that everybody else is going along with and pretending not to notice the evil of, and the anger they exhibit is the same that lies just beneath the surface of virtually every person whose ever taken part in any kind of "civilized" community.

Hartigan punches out his partner and actually has the temerity to stop the Senator's son from his depraved act.

"Don't you know who I am?" screams the pedophile, as if his standing in this corrupt society is the justification for what he's doing. Yeah, this kind of attitude is all over the place in real life, and Hartigan erupts with the anger that all of us feel for being forced into a position of submission to such people, and does the appropriate thing.

Next we go to Marv, who, although has lived his whole life outside the law, believes in the same Code as Hartigan. He finds himself in bed with a murdered prostitute and decides to kill his way to the top of the food chain in order to find out who was responsible for her death. The line of corruption goes much farther than he could have reasonably expected (although it pretty much is par for the course in "Sin City"). Marv kills everybody who was involved, no matter how small a role they fulfilled.

"I'm going to make them pay for what they did to Goldie!" He keeps saying, and many of the victims make the mistake of minimalizing Goldie's death because she was just a whore. But according to the rules of "Sin City" that all the main characters adhere to, violence to women or children is the most egregious act and anybody who does this must pay with their blood. It's kind of a strangely chivalrous attitude, and most of Miller's characters appoint themselves as kind of Knight protectors of women.

Never once is Marv in the least hesitant as he kills his way through police battalions and is run over by cars and shot with machine guns. And no, he's not supposed to be a super-hero as idiots are prone to wonder as they watch Marv survive fatal wounds again and again. This is a move! The images are METAPHORS. Marv's physical toughness is a representation of his ethical resolve. A woman has been killed, the jungle will not be at ease again until the perpetrator has been made to pay.

Marv finally kills his way to the top, and you get the sense that he's lived outside the law his whole life because of his unwillingness to compromise. He won't play ball just to get personally ahead, and that's what's put him on the outside, not because he's a homicidal killer. In reality, Marv is an even more pure of heart character than Hartigan because Hartigan has been willing to play ball just to get ahead in society while Marv is too innocent or stupid to allow it. Marv's big enough and tough enough so that he can follow what he thinks to be right without compromises, but most people in the world aren't strong enough to survive the kind of conflict Marv's hit with. Most people who watch "Sin City" find the Marv section to be the best. I think that's because, in the end, the Marv character is the purest hero of the film.

Dwight, played by Clive Owen, is a sort of Mirror image of Hartigan but on the other side of the law. He's willing to play ball more than Marv, but he's not ready to make the same sacrifices of identity that Hartigan does. Still, he's got the same beliefs of justice that the other two have, and is willing to solve problems the most efficient way possible whether that means following the law or not. Dwight is the most dangerous of the three and is quite similar to Clint Eastwood's man with no name character from the Spaghetti Westerns. The Dwight segment is the weakest link in the film in my opinion, but it still has some great storytelling moments, especially the revelations leading up to Raferty's identity as an undercover cop.

"Something was wrong, something I couldn't quite put my finger on," Dwight thinks to himself, remembering the last thing his girlfriend yelled to him before he jumped out her window. This is perfect stuff, really vague, and it sets up the tension for when Dwight finds Raferty's badge later.

The single most important scene in "Sin City" is Hartigan's reaction after freeing little Nancy, who has grown up into sensuous, stripper Nancy. Most people I talked to seemed to think it was a little out of character that Hartigan would kill himself to protect her rather than go after the Senator who was pursuing them. But, thematically, this is exactly what needed to happen. The corruption that Miller is referring to all throughout "Sin City" is not something that can be erased with one little assassination or act of good. It's a hopeless part of the human experience, something we're all going to have to face at one point or another. There's no hero that can come and save the day, it's always going to be there, the best you can hope to do is stave it off for a while.

Furthermore, it wouldn't have been right if Hartigan had killed the Senator and went off to live with Nancy. He was her protector, her Galahad, and his motivations had to be pure. It wasn't about doing something so that he could have one sweaty night with her, or use her in any way. He wanted to save her because it was the right thing to do. To gain something from the act would be to cheapen it. Therefore he kills himself, and the girl is safe, not just from the Senator, but from him.

Actually, when you look at it, "Sin City" has an excessive expectation of what is appropriate behavior for men. Some men think that they're just pieces of shit and are unworthy of love and that the only thing they can do in their lives to justify their meaningless existences is to sacrifice themselves to save some woman or child. This sounds like a noble sentiment, but it really is reflective of a kind of social prejudice that has been following men for all of recorded history. Nobody should be made to feel they are unworthy of love, where are the champions to come and save the Hartigan's, Marv's and Dwight's of the real world. For some reason, human beings still equate beauty with nobility, even though beauty in itself has rarely done anything of any worth. However, protecting beauty and innocence is what gives the men of "Sin City" their motivation to live and act, so I suppose it is good for something. Two hours of hardcore entertainment at the very least.

The End