Starring: Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis (I)

4 out of 10 stars I think it was Woody Allen who said of watching pornographic movies, "For the first half hour all you want to do is have sex, after that you never want to have sex again for the rest of your life."

That's the feeling you get watching Sin City. By engaging with it on the primal levels that are initially attractive you end up feeling dirty, like you need a shower, like you've just walked out of a porn emporium; you might have gone in feeling vaguely randy but you leave feeling unclean.

Unlike the truly dirty, unnerving titillation that David Lynch provides in films such as Mulholland Drive (damn I wish that movie made sense), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Blue Velvet Sin City is a teenage, masturbatory form of scopophilia, mixed in with a neutered form of pubescent anger, creating a reeking pituitary gland of movie.

But let's give credit where credit is due, director Robert Rodriguez has made a faithful, reeking pituitary gland of movie (he also helped craft a very good score along with Graeme Revel and John Debney). He has captured, almost panel for panel, Frank Miller's original graphic novels onscreen (which were, let's face it, beautiful in their own right); he's certainly captured their corrupt, vile essence.

Sin City is a anthology of three of Miller's Dark Horse installments and each tale is full of wanton women, diabolically powerful (or sometimes just insanely evil) men, and flawed but honorable "heroes." Rodriguez has taken the three selected originals to be holy writ. Very little of the dialogue has changed, and almost every panel appears to be represented at one point or another as the tales unfold. The best segment (and that's a relative statement) is the first of Miller's installments "The Hard Goodbye" (though, in my copy, I don't see that title). It's about Marv, a raging behemoth who, for the love of Goldie (Jamie King), a woman who has slept with him only one night, goes after her killers with a kind of vengeance and remorselessness that Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood didn't dare attempt. Marv is played by Mickey Rourke, the actor who, for my money, gives us a glimpse into what James Dean would have been like if he hadn't killed himself in his Porsche Spyder (glimpses of greatness buried under mounds of self-inflicted failure). Marv's relentless aggression, and a scene with Carla Gugino that I can only relate as perfection, grab you on that primal level. But it doesn't last long.

Marv's pursuit of the Goldie's killer leads him all the way to the top. The top in Miller's universe is Cardinal Roark, played by Rutger Hauer. The good cardinal, it turns out, is a cannibal who eats hookers. He's turned on to this confection by Kevin, played by a creepy Elijah Wood. Well, the character is creepy in the original, Wood just turns him from what looked to be a CPA gone wrong into a Glee-Club Jeffrey Dahmer who reads the Bible. Marv figures out all of this when a priest (played by Miller himself) fingers Roark (shortly before Marv dispatches him as well). Miller: 3, Organized Religion: 0.

See how Miller has exposed the façade of Hayes Code fanaticism of the noir tradition by making the religious guys the true creeps? Hasn't Miller tapped into the best of the literary tradition, Moliere, Voltaire, Strinberg and others, by indicting the clergy? Except, see, he's done it in a comic book. Oh, the sublime brilliance of it all. Or it could be that Miller's just not all that imaginative.

There is a large helping of torture and violence in Sin City but it's amazing how repetitive it is. Heads get dunked in toilets (twice, and it is actually different than torture in this film) when they're not getting cut off, bodies are riddled with bullets, appendages get lopped off here and there (fingers, hands, legs, arms) but the special treatment seems to have been reserved for the penis. There's lots and lots of violence to the groin in Sin City. Men get shot in the crotch (at least four times), men have their unit ripped off, one could say it's a fairly phallic movie.

About half of the crotch abuse comes in the "That Yellow Bastard," the final segment (with a preamble as well that is near the beginning of the film) featuring Bruce Willis as aging cop John Hartigan. Hartigan has a heart condition but that doesn't stop him from pursuing a child murderer (played by Nick Stahl), even as he's having a full-on heart attack. Hartigan stops the sicko just as he intends to rape and murder a little girl in his clutches but he's then shot by his own partner and framed for the crime. Leap forward several years and Hartigan gets released, all to find that the little girl that he saved has now become a successful stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold (Jessica Alba). But the child murderer has followed Hartigan and intends to get even for the rape and murder he didn't get to commit. "That Yellow Bastard" is a nasty piece of business, including the aforementioned crotch abuse, the now-cliche story device of child rape and torture, and a truly foul whipping sequence that crosses some serious borders.

Clive Owen headlines "The Big Fat Kill" as Dwight McCarthy, a guy who gets caught in an escalating war in Old Town, a section of Sin City where the prostitutes rule the streets and an uneasy truce exists between the dirty cops and the streetwalkers. But when an aggressive, odious guy named Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) pushes the girls too far they mete out their revenge, shattering the shaky agreement. "Fat Kill" comes dead-center in the film and it fills space, more or less.

There will be a lot of talk that this is an homage to the noir films of the late `40s and early `50s as the geeks lock arms to defend Sin City (just as they did for Kill Bill, they're loyal to a fault). But this is noir in the way that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was a serial. Though it looks the way it should, there is something emphatically bloodless about this very bloody Sin City. It seems to have amped up the cruelty to mask its lack of character, humanity, or actual story. Miller has said repeatedly that the central themes are love stories, which is even more pathetic and indicative of his puerile concept of the word and invoking it in a noir setting seems ill-informed. Sin City is black and white all right, the dames are tough and need a good cuffing and the guys are tougher and are just the ones to give it to 'em, but it's no more noir than a comic book is a Dashiell Hammett novel.