The past several years have seen the rise of the big-budget comic book movie. Most of these have featured our favorite superheroes fighting the bad guys.

Frank Miller&s &Sin City& is about bad guys fighting worse guys.

Sin City is not a story 8211; it&s a collection of stories about different twisted individuals all living in the same corrupt town. There&s the aging street tough Marv (Mickey Rourke) who finds himself being framed for the murder of the only woman he&s ever loved (Jaime King).

There&s the fugitive murderer (Clive Owen) who helps to save a group of prostitutes from the wrath of a corrupt police department, and there&s Hardigan (Bruce Willis), the last honest cop in Sin City.

It&s not exactly the family film of the year.

The film is based on Miller&s series of graphic novels by the same name. Miller wrote the script and worked with director Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi) to re-create the stories from his novels frame-by-frame, word-for-word.

Quentin Tarantino also worked on the project as a guest director and many of the action scenes bear his signature style of over-the-top choreography.

Rodriguez, who chose to shoot the film in black and white, supervised cinematography. The technique emulated the white-on-black inking of the graphic novels and the result is film noir taken to a whole new level.

Occasionally, certain colors are present in the film. Red sequin dresses shimmer among the black and grey suits, and Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) stands out considerably among the other individuals, who almost always appear in black and white.

Action scenes in &Sin City& are spectacular. The directors make no attempt at realism when they show scenes like Marv jumping through the windshield of a speeding police car and Hardigan beating Yellow Bastard into a puddle of yellow ooze. Scenes like these are pure fantasy and they don&t pretend to be anything else.

The resulting gore is also more impressionist than realistic. Movies shot in black and white are often a problem for special effects experts. Typically in black and white films, blood is indistinguishable from water or paint. In &Sin City,& the blood appears phosphorescent white, adding to the fantasy element of the film.

Performances by Willis and Rourke are impressive; Nick Stahl&s is less so. The acting seems wooden at times and the character&s narrations grow monotonous, as they all seem to share the same personality.

The dialect is also full of clichés. Many of these flaws are to be expected, however, since much of the dialogue was taken directly from the pages of Miller&s books.

Fans of the Sin City graphic novels will enjoy the movie. Likewise, those unfamiliar with the stories may want to check out some of Miller&s work before seeing it.