Believe the hype: Sin City is one for geeks of all stripes

From the first few moments of Sin City, you can know if you’ll like it or not.

With heavy-handed noir narration, a gorgeous woman and dashing young man share a smoke outside a party. Her red dress and pouty lips stand out like blood against the bleak grayscale landscape. You want to know her. The young man wants to know her. Then - just like that - she’s dead. So it begins.

Equal parts beautiful and terrifically violent, Sin City is a pitch-perfect homage to both classic film noir and comic book styling. In fact, this film just might me the most successfully ambitious film project ever completed.

To a comic book fan and film fanatic, Sin City is like a morbid wet dream. But what could one expect when you get minds like that of director Robert Rodriguez, guest director Quentin Tarantino, author Frank Miller and mogul Harvey Weinstein together?

Based on Miller’s graphic novels, the film Sin City is really a combination of a few of Miller’s individual tales. Three stories, each with the underlying themes of redemption and passion unfold on the bleak, rain-soaked streets of fictional Sin City (which looks to be both a futuristic and past version of New York).

It has to be noted right off the bat that this movie isn’t so much a graphic novel adaptation as it is a pop-art work brought to stunning life. Rodriguez obviously toiled to get Miller’s work exactly right. Ever moment moves like a paneled page, with characters moving quickly without actual movement and situations seemingly changing on their own. More is said with a look, a scene or a single word than an entire page of dialogue.

What dialogue there is doesn’t translate well to modern film storytelling, but I’m not so sure it supposed to. The narration of each piece, which is the primary voice in every segment, is exactly as heavy-handed and overtly flowery as it should be for a classic noir film (as opposed to the fast-paced quirky dialogue of today’s crime films). The characters too are perfectly fitting for this genre-without-a-genre.

There’s a beaten-down "good" cop seeking redemption (Bruce Willis), a monster of a man seeking revenge for a slain lover (Mickey Rourke), a stripper with a heart of gold (Jessica Alba), a pistol-packing hooker (Rosario Dawson), a crooked cop (Benicio Del Toro), a well-meaning ex-con (Clive Owen) and, of course, a trifecta of bad guys that seem to represent all manner of pure evil.

More modern film fans will note the Pulp Fiction-like storytelling (out of order shorts that somewhat intertwine) and Kill Bill-esque depiction of graphic violence, of which there is plenty.

In fact, I’ll daresay this may be the most graphically violent movie I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying a lot, considering the blood is rarely even red. But at no point was this viewer ever bored or disgusted. I was enthralled. So don’t listen to the (surprisingly few) overly-sensitive critics who wrote this film off as just another uber-violent comic film a la “The Punisher.”

This isn’t a film, it’s an experience. And frankly, you’re cheating yourself if you don’t shell out a few bucks just to take Mr. Miller’s wild ride at least once on the big screen.