It comes out today (obviously) and in light of new evidence, there's no way I'm seeing this.
I talked with one of my best online friends lately and he said throughout the film there's this woman who you see naked from the waist down. You see her rear clearly, and her, ahem "front part" is covered only by a tiny triangle (sorry for the image). Let's just say it was so bad they couldn't even show a clip on TV at 11 PM.
Also, here are three reviews that might help:
From James Rocchi at Netflix:
"This super-stylish, hard-boiled crime film has a vibrant, vulgar exterior ... and a completely empty heart."
In Basin City, there's both the petty crime of the city's scroungers and crooks and the institutionalized crime of the corrupt ruling elite. It's the kind of town where a down-on-his luck bruiser with scarred flesh and a heart of gold (Mickey Rourke) will risk death and worse to avenge a murdered prostitute he knew only for one night; where a fugitive killer with a brand-new face (Clive Owen) can risk everything to protect his girlfriend and try to safeguard the fragile truce between the police and prostitutes that keeps the city from open war; where a cop (Bruce Willis) can save a little girl from the connected, pedophile-predator son (Nick Stahl) of the man who controls the entire town ... then get framed, serve eight years in prison for the very crime he prevented and still have to protect the now-grown-up woman (Jessica Alba) from a lunatic's rage.
All three of those plotlines have a two-fisted punch to them, but if they also sound simplistic, that's because they are. Adapted from a series of graphic novels -- essentially, violent comic books -- by Frank Miller, Sin City is a chance for Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, El Mariachi) to try some new moviemaking tricks while playing out story lines we've all seen a dozen times before. Much has been made of the fact that Rodriguez created all-digital backgrounds, sets and exteriors for this film, using Miller's stark black-and-white drawings as his blueprint. I guess the plan is to keep the audience distracted by the bells and whistles so they won't notice how tired the plot is -- or how hollow the characters are.
I once read a blurb for a crime novel in which someone breathlessly gushed that the book's tone was "so hard-boiled the pot's burned black." Well, Sin City is so hard-boiled the stove is on fire -- a violent, raw, grim and blood-slicked slide into the pits of hell. Bear in mind, I'm hardly squeamish about film violence; I like a good meat-and-potatoes action film as much as the next person. But Sin City isn't even meat and potatoes; it's a raw, oozing, bloody hunk of meat with no sides, no garnish and no presentation beyond being slapped down on the plate in front of you with a sneer.
What's more, Sin City isn't so much a tribute to old-fashioned crime movies as it is a set of Cliff's Notes that knows all the high points but can't give the deeper context -- all of the flash with none of the atmosphere and all of the flavor with no nutrition. After a couple of hours of scenes that feel like big finales, you're not thrilled -- just exhausted. People who think they love Sin City may just be surrendering to its unrelenting bloodiness, hypnotically repetitive narration and stereotypical characters (whom over-educated comics fans will convince themselves are archetypal).
Sin City might also go down a little better if it didn't have such an immature vision of women's strength. Showing us a woman in bondage gear committing mass murder with a machine gun isn't a new kind of female empowerment -- it's just a different kind of sexism. Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, but you knew what kind of person Uma Thurman's Bride character was, you knew what she wanted and you knew why she wanted it. You can't say the same for any character in Sin City; when Owen's Dwight mentions that he's an on-the-run murderer given a second chance by plastic surgery, it's amazingly casual -- pretty much thrown away. I've never expected well-written characters from Rodriguez; his films are exercises in pure, almost weightless velocity. But El Mariachi looks like stage drama compared to the glossy nothingness of Sin City.
Rodriguez has a great cast that he pretty much wastes. Rourke is a creepily watchable standout, but even actors such as Willis, Owen, Benicio Del Toro and Rosario Dawson can't rise above the shallow nature of the material. And the style is engaging, but the hyper-stylized black-and-white footage seems to be saying nothing more than "Hey! I can get away with crazy violence in monochrome that I never could get past the ratings board if it were in color!" (Tarantino proved the same thing with one sequence in the far-superior Kill Bill, at which point he got back to the actual business of telling a story about characters.) Technically, Sin City marks how far Rodriguez has pushed the envelope; the problem is that the envelope's empty.
Lisa Schwarzbaum's Review (Entertainment Weekly)
Brian Webster's Review (Apollo Guide)