ONE thing becomes clear from the opening shots of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s stylistically dazzling adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel Sin City. This lawless town makes its own cinematic rules. Elements that would attract criticism in another, less assured, movie make perfect sense in this hard-boiled, bullet-splattered world.

Take the characters, as two-dimensional as the bold pen and ink sketches that first gave them life. The males are square-jawed and scarred, with voices that sound as if they have been scraped out of an over-full ashtray at three in the morning. The girls bring a new significance to the term “drop-dead gorgeous”. Amoral dames in PVC fetish wear, they rule the streets they walk for a living.

These guys and dolls are governed by the most basic urges: sex, beer, bourbon or revenge. There’s no subtlety, no depth to the characterisation, but that really doesn’t matter. Miller’s work is about creating the iconic; crafting comic-book antiheroes as stark and stylised as the striking monochrome backdrop of subterranean alleyways and dive bars of a city that breeds sin.

Then there’s the violence. The main colour that cuts through the blacks, whites and greys of this twilight underworld is blood-red, and plenty of it as the dark-hearted inhabitants settle old scores. But the shock of the violence is mitigated somewhat by Rodriguez and Miller having created a world in digital post-production so stylised that it might as well be in a cartoon.

Sin City is as unconventional structurally as it is in every other way. Told in chapters, the film unfolds like short stories in a pulp crime magazine. First up is a brief snippet of Josh Hartnett as a hired assassin, then the first main story — Bruce Willis as an ageing, ailing detective who is determined to rescue a kidnapped girl (Jessica Alba).

Mickey Rourke is tremendous in the next section, peering through layers of prosthetics and a simmering bad attitude as Marv, a street-fighting outsider aiming to avenge his only true love. Next up are Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and Rosario Dawson in the story of a street battle between Sin City’s formidable hookers, the organised crime outfit who want to control their territory and the police, whose hands are as dirty as anyone’s in this filthy underworld.

It might have been a better film if Sin City ended here, but the film-makers are so enamoured of their seamy creation, and of the undeniable coolness of their film, that they outstay their welcome. So we return to Willis and pitch him against Nick Stahl, re-imagined as some kind of nightmarish acid-yellow gremlin.

It’s not that this story is less effective than the others, although the jaundiced demon does jar in the otherwise monochrome colour scheme. It’s just that two hours is an awfully long time to spend as a tourist in a place like Sin City.

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