Sin City: Er...

Two college friends and I watched Frank Miller's Sin City tonight. The movie is a series of loosely related vignettes, each attempting a cynical noir feel and each falling short. The characters are all dish out and take their share of physical abuse, gunshot wounds, dismemberment, etc. but the torturous scenes go on a tad too long, just long enough so I stopped empathizing with the characters and started laughing at them.

The abuse the characters take is less meaningful because they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep going; more cartoons than characters. And to top it off, each vignette features long-winded narration sounding more like one pompous voice than many.

I wanted to like this movie more, but it seemed as if each scene had at least one overdone detail to undermine it and the movie as a whole.

Frank Miller worked wonders to revitalize the Daredevil and Batman comics, but this movie makes him seem incredibly full of himself. I'm reminded of George Lucas's heavy-handedness and nitpicking in Star Wars Episodes I and II. Miller and Lucas have jumped the shark.