Sin City: More Stars

There is a mode of thought stating that just because a cast and crew have fun making a movie, doesn’t mean the movie will be fun to watch. Sometimes this isn’t true, but usually it is, and filmmakers get so caught up in the fun they’re having that they forget to consider the audience. Such is the problem with “Sin City.”

It’s not that Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Miller or the rest of the enormous cast aren’t up to the challenge. Indeed, all doubts about the film’s feel are removed the first time Michael Madsen opens his mouth and speaks in a stilted staccato that emulates, embraces and lampoons old-school film noir all at the same time. The filmmakers knew exactly what they were going for, and most of the time they hit it out of the park.

The film is actually made up of three stories from Miller’s “Sin City” comics: “The Big Fat Kill,” “That Yellow Bastard” and “The Hard Goodbye.” Each of the stories is similar, again as a homage to or a send-up of the noir style, revolving around a brutish man who does something incredibly violent for the woman he shouldn’t love but does.

Despite the film’s selective use of color over a predominantly black-and-white frame, “incredibly violent” means just that. Clearly Rodriguez and Co. had much of their fun devising ways for gore to be expressed in black, white and several other surprising colors. Crotches are ripped apart, skulls are crushed, corpses are dismembered, axes are tossed, bows are fired, talons are slashed, guns are put to all manner of creative use ... the list of brutalization is quite thorough.