Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller team up to direct Sin City, based on Millers comics of the same name. Granted comic spin-offs have pummeled moviegoers in the past few years but with just a glimpse of this digitally rendered monochromatic film noir you’ll immediately know this film is quite a bit different. It doesn’t just adapt a comic to the screen, it brazenly revels in everything the more expansive medium can provide.

This isn’t Dick Tracy—it’s dark, sexy, and extremely violent. It doesn’t have a specific time frame as the streets are mixed with Ferraris and vintage ragtops while the dress is trench coat and dominatrix-wear and everything in between. It is a literal translation of a comic based on timeless and placeless vision of urban crime, corruption, and passion.

The film takes three storylines that are nearly wholly self-contained and overlaps them in a few choice encounters. The all-star cast at times sparkles, but occasionally falters: Mickey Rourke nearly steals the show as a battered and beleaguered thug bent on avenging the life of the only person who had ever been kind to him, while in another storyline Rosario Dawson leads a troop of emancipated hookers in a battle to maintain control of their fragment of Sin City. While Rourke and Dawson’s characters bring life to the drab backdrop, Jessica Alba is terribly bland and unconvincing, seemingly just eye-candy along for the ride next to an average Bruce Willis. Luckily their vignette is saved by a disgustingly horrid Nick Shahl, who plays pedophile / sexual predator Yellow Bastard.

This page from Film Rot details what a literal translation was made from comic to film in Sin City. Almost pane-by-pane the original work functioned as the movie’s storyboard. Here’s the movie’s official site, and the site of Dark Horse Comics. Some won’t have the stomach for an extended stay in Sin City, but if you can appreciate as much style and panache as you can blood and passion in your movies then you’ll thank me for telling you to see this one on the big screen.