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| It'll be way too much for Bush America, which is the best thing I can say about it... The worst thing I can say about this savage, sexy and ferociously funny screen translation of three stories from Frank Miller's Sin City series of graphic novels is that it's too much of a good thing. |
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| (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) |
| For geeks, action freaks and sensation-seeking teenage boys of all ages, the price of admission will provide a one-way ticket to hard-boiled heaven. |
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| (Todd McCarthy, Variety) |
| This is noir on steroids, cartoonishly ultra-violent and drawing inspiration from Mickey Spillane novels and E.C. comics of the '50s. |
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| (Lou Lumenick, New York Post) |
| Once you're good and drunk on the look, details like the tin-eared tough-guy dialogue (which sounds especially stilted issuing from flesh-and-blood mouths) don't seem so important. |
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| (Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide) |
| Sin City has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore. |
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| (Manohla Dargis, New York Times) |
| Sin City is always moving on to the next thing, and despite surprisingly good work from its large cast (especially Rourke and Owen, who are both outstanding), the picture feels synthetic and artificial. |
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| (Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald) |
| The film is never less than visually striking, and Rodriguez is also credited as editor and cinematographer. Some of the stunt work and special effects are astonishing, as in the scene where Rourke is pursued by the police and descends a stairwell like a trapeze artist and then throws himself through the windscreen of a patrol car and ejects its occupants. Yet, ultimately, this is an inhumane film, its brutality showing the same contempt for the vulnerability of the human body as the devisers of video games or the warders in Abu Ghraib do. The relentless violence the heroes inflict is matched (but not justified) by the sustained displays of masochism they experience and enjoy. There is also sentimentality underlying their romantic gallantry and macho posturing. The hard-boiled dialogue isn't in the class of Hammett, Chandler or Ellroy. It's closer to the lower end of the pulp-food chain. There are occasional good lines ('You're running out of valley, cowboy') but at one point, the hapless Willis has to say: 'When it comes to comforting a traumatised 11-year-old, I'm as useful as a palsy victim performing brain surgery with a pipe wrench.' As for the rasping, gravelly voices of the cast, one suspects the continual rain has made laryngitis endemic in Sin City. |
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| (Philip French, Observer) |
| Call me sad. Call me sick. Call me Ishmael. But I loved it... The film does have serious flaws. It goes on for too long. And there are no great women characters to fall for. Instead of mysterious and alluring femmes fatales, we get a parade of undistinguished ‘babes’... On the male side, Clive Owen never finds the right voice or look for his part as Dwight; he’s like an actor playing a part. |
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| (Cosmo Landesman, Sunday Times) |
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