As much as I love Darren Aronofsky, back in 2008 whenever I heard anyone giving him credit for singlehandedly resuscitating Mickey Rourke’s career, one word kept coming into my head: Marv. Despite the myth that Rourke had dropped off the cinematic map until Aronofsky went and found him, a quick peek at his IMDB page confirms that he never really went away. It’s true that The Wrestler was a different calibre of performance to the ones he was giving in The Pledge and Tony Scott’s Domino, but at the time that he was being celebrated for finally turning in another great performance, it had only been three years since his last one.

2005′s Sin City sees Rourke on top form, and to me he feels very much the centre of a film which is divided up pretty equally between him, Bruce Willis, and Clive Owen (w/ Benicio Del Toro). Marv is classic Frank Miller: square-jawed and hulking, nigh on invincible, and just flawed enough at his core to make you care. Miller (& Rodriguez) aren’t afraid to test an audience’s limits of compassion, and watching Sin City can sometimes feel like an exercise in figuring out who you dislike least. As a writer Miller is curious about absolutes, and the idea of finding out what happens when two conflicting absolutes run into one another. His bad guys–such as the sadistic cannibal Kevin, and the serial torture-rapist Roark Jr.–are irredeemably blacker than black (unless they’re yellow), and his good guys are often most at home in the grey areas.

And Sin City is one giant grey area. Throughout the film’s two hours we see corruption everywhere from its mayoral office, through its police force, to its religious leaders. The closest the city has to heroes are the vigilantes and prostitutes brave enough to take matters into their own hands.

Having not read the source comics I can’t speak to how faithful an adaptation this is, but there’s a definite sense of the story’s original format in the way the film is presented. Sometimes that can work for the film: providing it a unique style and a perfect excuse to indulge in gratuity and excess. Sometimes it can work against the film: leaving the structure of the film’s various plots seeming disjointed and disunited. Bookending the movie with two short Josh Hartnett scenes, inside of which are another pair of bookends of the Bruce Willis storyline, inside of which are two other stories feels more than a little clunky. And whereas self-contained stories work well in the weekly comic format, the cinematic effect of meeting Willis’s Hartigan in the second scene and then losing track of him for 90 minutes is less effective. Perhaps if more of an effort had been made to interweave the telling of these tales–as Rodriguez’s best pal Tarantino had accomplished masterfully the year before in Pulp Fiction–the film would feel a bit smoother.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Rodriguez’s work. Again, I can’t speak to the Spy Kids movies, but some of his more outlandish sensibilities (along with a deep-seated dislike of Antonio Banderas) really put me off the El Mariachi trilogy. Here it seems that being kept within the stylistic confines of Miller’s look and feel helps rein Rodriguez in a little; it’s hard to fault Sin City on the way it looks, the way it moves and the tone it captures throughout.

Rodriguez has also assembled a wonderful cast. As well as a great none-more-noir performance from Rourke, Bruce Willis gives good hard-bitten cop, Benicio Del Toro expertly walks the line Nicholas Cage can never find between crazy and too crazy, and amongst the women Jessica Alba is solid and Brittany Murphy turns in some of the best scenes of her short career.

Though there has been speculation for five years now about a sequel, the question remains whether another set of stories simply shot and presented in the same style would be enough to satisfy. Personally I would happily return to Rodriguez & Miller’s Sin City; the look, by virtue of its abstractness and relative simplicity, hasn’t dated at all since the film’s release, and if there are more stories to be told as entertaining as the ones here then it’s a ride I’d happily take. That said, if QT is available to give some script structure advice that would be a call worth making.