I have found nothing more surprising in recent days than the torrent of ultra positive reviews for Robert Rodriguez’s interpretation of Frank Miller’s Graphic (with a capital G) Novel Sin City. It literally astounds me. I wonder now if I didn’t accidentally wander into the wrong theater, in the wrong alternate dimension to see a movie only half as good as the one everyone is raving about. But the clips they show, and the elements they describe seem consistent with what I saw, so the theory that I saw the wrong movie won’t hold up.

Now I’ve never read the Sin City Novels. My exposure to Frank Miller comes from his excellent work on a couple of Batman graphic novels. Having seen the movie version of Sin City (and been assured of its faithfulness to Miller’s vision) I’m not rushing out to buy or borrow them now. Miller’s universe (and even those who love it admit that it has no foundation in reality) is only about one thing: violence. Murder, mayhem and mutilation are how they measure the moments in this miserable milieu. If there was something else, the clever dialogue of Kill Bill, the interesting characters of Pulp Fiction, the intrigue of Once Upon a Time in Mexico, anything to balance the pointless violence; I might have actually enjoyed this film. But after twenty minutes of death and destruction the unique visual style, competent direction and generally fine acting wasn’t enough to keep this film going.

The first third of the film focuses on Marv, a character who didn’t read Major League Baseball’s new steroid policy and is probably the closest thing to an actual character we get in the entire film. When a hooker named Goldie (oh, it’s not enough to feed us the mindless cliché of a hooker with a heart of gold, we have to name her Goldie) gets murdered while in bed with him, he launches a one man crusade to find the killer. Never mind that he’s been framed for the crime, his motive is to avenge Goldie no matter what the cost. He’s led to a cannibal played by Elijah Wood. Now if you’ve ever wondered what a battle between a Hobbit and the Incredible Hulk might look like this is your chance to find out. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t turn my brain off long enough to not ask the obvious questions. Why frame Marv for murder, when the cops weren’t even looking for the killer? Why even go to all the trouble of killing Goldie if you can’t fulfill the all the psychosexual impulses that lead you to be a cannibalistic serial killer in the first place? I mean, all that does is bring Marv to your doorstep and the cops are following him. And of course tying the church and state to this particular sociopath doesn’t make any sense, isn’t explained, and is pointless.

The film’s second major sociopath (and I think it’s fair to divide the male characters in this film into two categories, the heroes, who are psychopaths, and the villains, who are sociopaths) is the child molester son of a senator. He becomes the Yellow Bastard in the film’s final sequence. The psychopath opposing him is the last honest cop, Hartigan. The entire focus of his existence is a young girl, Nancy Callahan, who grows up to be Jessica Alba. We hear that he has a wife and a life, but both of these mental props are quickly thrown away for Nancy’s sake. He rots in prison for 8 years until the letters from Nancy stop and he realizes she may not be safe out there on her own. Apparently nobody could figure out who was sending him mail all those years, and the only way to get to him was to trick him into getting himself let out of prison so he could lead them to the mysterious Cordelia who turned out to be Nancy, who everyone knew was the girl saved from the senator’s son in the first place. Huh? I don’t know what they put in the drinking water in Sin City, but it must make everyone as stupid as it makes them violent. Nancy, of course, grows up to be a stripper, one of three occupations straight women can have in Sin City (the other two are hooker and cocktail waitress. Lesbians get to be parole officers or psychologists.) She promptly falls back into the clutches of the senator’s son (at least here we have a clear reason for the police to look the other way) and has to be saved again by Hartigan. Hartigan is nothing but the savior of Nancy; there is nothing more to the character than that. Nancy does nothing but get saved by Hartigan (well that and strip and write a few letters), there is nothing more to her character than that. Why am I supposed to care?

Between the cannibal and the child molester we get the story about the hookers. We get no sex in a story about hookers, it’s all about how well armed they are and how they protect their turf. Watching Devon Aoki chop the bad guys up with her swords isn’t half as much fun as the Uma Thurman’s swordplay in Kill Bill. I still don’t know why they needed Clive Owen, since he fails miserably to get rid of the evidence that they killed the evil cop played by Benicio Del Toro. When the mob tries to take advantage of the situation the girls just mow them down. At least in the most pointless part of a pointless movie the women are not mere victims, but that still doesn’t make any of them actual characters. Even Alexis Bledel’s betrayal of Rosario Dawson is no more convincing to us than it was to Dawson; it fails to be anything resembling genuine character development.

Some accuse this film of being misogynistic, but it is way too simple minded for such a big word. If all the female characters exist only to be rescued or abused by the male characters then it is equally true that all of the male characters exist only to abuse or rescue the females. All of these characters are one note, and that note is violence, either in giving or receiving. And maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be, a cliché ridden and trite violence fest. But without the cleverness of a Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction that kind of violence just isn’t entertaining.