Until Frank Miller's Sin City (hereafter Sin City), maverick Mexican director Robert Rodriguez frustrated the hell out of me: here's this guy with all the talent in the world--an eye, an ear, an internal metronome as unerring as a clock tick--making incoherent movies literally without finished screenplays. Falling off high wires without nets and trying to look cool doing it--it ain't smooth, man, it's arrogance and it's misplaced. I thought he'd spent himself on flotsam like the last two Spy Kids flicks, thought he'd really screwed the pooch on a fiasco like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, on which he mistook Sergio Leone's formalist genre Diaspora for a mess of ideas trailing camera flourishes. But here, right before he unleashes some 3-D thing about a shark boy, Rodriguez slides in a movie for which he resigned from the Directors' Guild of America just so he could credit comic book legend Frank Miller as his co-director. Here, in Sin City, is what Robert Rodriguez can do with brutal, draconian structure (what's harsher than the cell of a comic-book panel?); here, finally, is productive fruit from his reputation as a rebel without a crew. Here's Sin City down low, on the QT, and very, hush hush: the most anti-Hollywood Hollywood picture since Kill Bill, and a film that, likewise, feels like some kind of miracle it was ever produced, much less released.

Three story arcs from Miller's astonishing Sin City comic book series are recreated in Sin City faithfully, meticulously, even, when not being embellished by the author himself: "The Hard Goodbye," with Mickey Rourke as golem Marv (and Carla Gugino (brave and mostly in the altogether) as his lesbian parole officer/dealer) out to avenge the death of a hooker who showed him an instant of kindness; "The Big Fat Kill," with good-guy serial killer Dwight (Clive Owen) involved in covering up the murder of a corrupt cop (Benicio Del Toro) by a gang of Amazonian hookers; and "That Yellow Bastard," featuring straight-arrow cop with a bad ticker Hartigan (Bruce Willis, whose first words to Miller on set were: "About that script... I want more of the stuff from the comics put back in"). Single-handedly raising the comic-book genre to respectability with his Batman opus The Dark Knight Returns (when you hear someone talk knowingly about the "graphic novel," be aware that at some level they're talking about Frank Miller), Sin City single-handedly resurrects hope that impossible works like Miller's Batman epics (Dark Knight Returns or Year One) or 300 can be brought to the screen as something both faithful and sexy--hope that was fast-fleeting just a few weeks ago with the simpering, compromised adaptation of Hellblazer, Constantine. The biggest surprise might be that Sin City is a product, in all its grit and glory, of the same green-screen process that produced the niftily antiseptic Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Sin City feels like love even though it's steeped in the mean noir of Jules Dassin's Night and the City and, oddly enough, the prosthetic nightmare of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. Its heroes are darker than pitch and its villains are nightmares: a yellow goblin (Nick Stahl) with a weakness for little girls and an eyeless/soulless cannibal (Elijah Wood) with claws for fingernails (and an unusual trophy collection) live amongst mostly invisible puppet masters--the senators, bishops (Rutger Hauer), crime lords (Michael Clarke Duncan), and police captains--who are the source of all the city's misery. Though there's a band of killer whores (Devon Aoki (wisely given no lines), Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, and Jessica Alba (unwisely given a few)) at the centre of the film, like the best of films noir, the heart of Sin City is its obsession with the cult of masculinity. It takes a close look at the myth of the hardboiled antihero and finds its rewards questionable and its punishments cruel, expressing its displeasure in castration metaphors (beheading, backfiring) and literal castrations as the men, varying levels of brutal and animalistic, square off against one another in an almost primordial struggle. A scene staged at a tar pit with one unfortunate suspended from a dinosaur sculpture at night (when else?) during a rainstorm (what else?) could be the defining moment of the picture.

It's all about sack-size and the lizard brain--and as a film, it's something like pure aggression and machismo, freebased on a filthy spoon and shunted into an open vein. An eight ball of posturing, the savage Sin City is puerility at its most exhilarating. It feels insular, hermetically sealed, and magnified to the point of opera and caricature--what else to think of a grimy pulp piece that calls one character Lancelot (King Arthur himself, Clive Owen, demoted) and another Galahad? If Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and Carroll John Daly were still jamming their roscoes in some patsy's buttonhole, they'd be doing it like this. Nasty, uncompromising, an instant cult classic, Sin City is most definitely not for every taste (were it not so stylized, it would surely have earned an X for grue), but it is that once-a-year reminder, hot and dangerous, of why it is a lot of us started going to the movies in the first place.-Walter Chaw