Frank Miller, already a bit of a comic book legend (thanks to his graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns) when he introduced his first Sin City comic book to the marketplace in the mid-nineties, took the conventions of noir and pushed them to their logical extremes. In that first graphic novel, and in the ones that followed, he created a city of hard boiled anti-heroes and busty dames, all of whom spouted dialogue that could have been written by Raymond Chandler had he not been under duress from the censors of his day, and all of whom were illustrated by Miller in the aesthetic he had already been working towards throughout his career: his was a world of bold lines and deep shadows, in which neither color (except on rare occasions) nor shade existed. He pedaled his stories in pure noirish black and white. And to speak again of extremes, of lack of censorship, these stories were brutally violent, often brutally sexual, and often both of those at the same time. Indeed, Miller published the first series under a new imprint created with other respected artists (including Geoff Darrow, Paul Chadwick and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola) specifically created to thwart the Comics Code.

Unwilling for a long time to cinematically dilute the essence of his masterworks, Miller is now credited as co-director on this adaptation, which otherwise was the creative brainchild of Robert Rodriguez. Made up of three of those graphic novels - the initial volume, followed by 'The Big Fat Kill' and 'That Yellow Bastard' - the film is a literal translation, in that Rodriguez used the comics as both scripts and storyboards, deviating from them only when necessary. By shooting the actors on a greenscreen (in his garage, natch) and adding the backgrounds in later, he was able to achieve the ungradual ink-heavy look of the comic.

Rodriguez's adaptation of the pure visual style of the artwork is an unquestionable triumph. The blacks and the whites, the light and shadows that define the frames are unnaturally pure. If one of the beautiful things about film stock is its near-infinite ability to organically capture tones, then this is yet another of Rodriguez's refutations of celluloid in favor of high definition technologies; for those tones that would normally be infinitely varied have been tightly restricted, pushed, pulled, so that cars, people, brick walls all seem to be made out of the same two-tone matter. It looks, unmistakably, like the comic books; the comic books are beautiful; therefore....

This visual acumen will be enough to please most audience members, both aficionados of Miller's work and newcomers to this morbidly enticing alternate universe of rough sex and violence; comic fans in particular may be too relieved at the faithfulness to notice anything suspect (although they may note that Rodriguez ignored the source material in one aspect when he waived Jessica Alba and Clive Owen from the task of providing what should have been the lion's share of the movie's nudity). Others, though, may detect something slightly askew; something slightly hollow to the whole exercise; and students of either medium in question here, or anyone who has read Scott McCloud's essential text 'Understanding Comics,' for that matter, will understand exactly why Rodriguez has, in one very key aspect, failed to bring Miller's work to the screen intact.

The world Miller created in his books was not at all realistic, but it played within the boundaries of reality, in the ways that comics can: when a character did something inhuman (as Marv would in the first volume), it was recognizable as stylistic hyperbole, and believable as such. And this, too, was the world of noir: Miller would hit little grace notes here and there, conventions of the genre (the way Marv named his gun 'Gladys,' for example) that made his universe instantly recognizable to anyone who'd read Hammett or Chandler or seen a Bogart picture - or even simply heard them spoken of. It was an undiluted representation of a genre which was itself an exaggeration of the real world. And art, at its best, should always be just that: a representation.

The film does not represent this genre, at least not in the same way and certainly not as directly. It is, rather, an imitation. And by maintaining such a slavish dedication to the form and content of Miller's work, Rodriguez undercuts the impact of much of the material. For here, when Marv plunges through doors and is hit by multiple automobiles (accompanied by emphatic swoops of the camera) and slugged by baseball bats and riddled with bullets and yet still soldiers on, his humanity grows increasingly suspect; conversely, the suspense and urgency of his story decreases. We're watching a monster, rather than a man with a propensity for monstrosity. (The makeup Mickey Rourke's performance shines through, which leaves the actor looking the spitting image of the illustrated Marv, needn't be faulted for this, although Rourke would have been good enough to suggest what the makeup makes explicit.)

It doesn't help, either, that the abbreviated pacing required of the film makes Marv's motivation in his quest to avenge the murder of the one woman who ever loved him, feel substantially less prevalent in the narrative; and without this sense of chivalry, so too goes the twisted morality on which the story depends. The second story in the film, 'The Big Fat Kill,' suffers even more grievously from this sense of truncation; it feels as if it is stumbling as it tries to keep up with itself. In the aforementioned 'Understanding Comics,' Scott McCloud explains that the most important part of the comic book storytelling form is the space between the panels; that which the reader's mind makes up for. This negative space, reliant both on the reader's imagination and the author's ability to properly foster it, cannot have an equivalent in the cinema. Sin City needs that space; it needs time to simmer.

It is with some relief that I note that the third segment in the picture, 'That Yellow Bastard,' does work. The story of a cop named Hartigan (played by Bruce Willis) and his obsessively paternal sense of duty towards a girl he once saved from a pedophile, it is the least action oriented but emotionally strongest of the bunch. The choices the characters are faced with, and the decisions they make, carry real weight, and the love story that develops between Hartigan and "skinny little Nancy Callahan" is perfectly developed. Nick Stahl gives a horrifying performance as the titular character; like Rourke, he's buried in makeup but knows how to make it invisible; he's a true villain, not a cartoon character. In other words, while watching this chapter, I forgot about the source material and was caught up in the film. Why did it happen in this one, and not the others? I think it may have been because Hartigan is ultimately a good person, as opposed to Marv in the first story and Clive Owen's Dwight in the second, who are bad guys who happen to be served with the role of a protagonist. Honest to goodness noir can flourish under such revers typifications; but this is imitation noir, and it needs an honest to goodness character to keep it feeling real.

I say all this, and I wonder: do I criticize because I love? Someone unfamiliar with the source material might not notice (at least consciously) the problems I've detailed in these paragraphs, and I must admit, those very problems aside, I found some thrill in seeing such familiar images brought so dynamically to life (on an image by image basis, the film could certainly be considered a masterpiece). Would I have preferred to see a loosely adapted version of Sin City, one which has the mark of its director more firmly in place than Miller's? The answer is no - those movies already exist, after all. The solution, of course, would have been for Sin City to be left in the medium it was created in, and created for. But as long as we have this film, and whatever followups we have in store (for there are more novels waiting to be adapted), I'll happily appreciate it for what it has to offer, and happily take it to task for where it cannot help but miss the mark.