That old story our fathers used to tell—of mom throwing out their priceless comic collection without permission—is already a relic. Comics in my lifetime have always been big business, and even my mother knew that. Growing up I scoured price guides and effortlessly knew the relative market shares of Marvel, D.C., and, later, Image (though I was a steadfast “Make mine Marvel!” partisan), the same way a budding multiplex cinephile might know his weekly box-office tallies. But my not-insubstantial collection still didn’t survive my adolescence—I sold all of my comic books at a ridiculous financial loss when I was 14. The money that I got I used to buy a few lousy punk-rock cassette tapes and matching T-shirts to impress a girl that I was interested in, who would wind up being my first girlfriend.

Our four-month thing was nothing special, and I can’t listen to more than 30 seconds of Dead Kennedys nowadays, but that decision to trade in my comics was one I’ve never regretted and never less than during the grueling two hours I spent watching Sin City, the nadir in the cottage industry of funny-book movies—comics are bigger business than ever, and stupider too! Robert Rodriguez’s latest is inspired by Frank Miller’s serial “graphic novel” of the same name. I add the ironic quotations because graphic novels—at least the slam-bang action variety—often seem to have as much relationship to real novels as “adult films” have to the movies, the joke of course being that it takes very little maturity to watch a cumshot or a dismemberment. Along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, Miller’s gritty stories—first set in the purgatorial Hell’s Kitchen of Daredevil, then the deco slums of Batman’s Gotham, and finally on the streets of Sin City—are frequently pointed to as the artistic high watermarks of grown-up comic books. If all the talk of Sin City’s fidelity to its source material is to be believed, this speaks very little for the graphic novel as a medium. Rodriguez and Miller’s movie is a sluggish, nasty, and dull product custom-made for a coddled McFarlane Toys generation that never had its comic books thrown away, and was never told to grow the fuck up. Mouth-breathing fanboys go worshipfully prostrate at the mention of Miller, and the Cahiers gang may crow about the formal invention of this flick, but it's really just the usual smash-bang with a lot more splatter thrown on it. If you want a really against-the-grain talent, look to Ann Nocenti—a flagrantly leftist woman in an uptight, masculine medium—who took over Daredevil from Miller, and turned the series toward spiritual inquiry and real questions about the repercussions of violence. Sin City, by contrast, is just plain adolescent, and in the most deleterious sense of the word—think angry walking boners with patchy skin and Army surplus trenchcoats Scotch-taping fireworks onto stray cats’ tails.

The story, if you have to know, combines three tales from Miller’s books: A detective on the cusp of retirement (Bruce Willis, trying and failing to channel Ralph Meeker) puts everything on the line to save a young girl (she’ll grow up to be Jessica Alba) from a pedophile sadist (Nick Stahl) who’s under the protection of a rich, high-ranking clergyman father (Powers Boothe). A juggernaut lug (a regally paunchy Mickey Rourke with a Kirk Douglas facial prosthesis) wakes up next to the still-warm corpse of the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (Jaime King) who was his for one night, then swears revenge on her assassins. A terse, confident tough guy (Clive Owen) hunts down the sleazy cop ex-boyfriend (a fright-wigged Benecio Del Toro) of his gal (Brittany Murphy) after the pig slaps her around, only to find himself drawn into a gangland war alongside his Amazonian streetwalking ex-flame (Rosario Dawson). And then the stories overlap and intersect and blah blah blah who cares?

As the preceding litany of parentheses suggests, the movie is glutted with recognizable names—Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, and Michael Clarke Duncan also pop up—most given little more than down-and-out vamping and f/x makeup modeling to do, though Rourke, that most wonderfully physical of actors, does at least bring a nice leonine pride to the roll of his stomp. Something about these novelty flicks just brings the stars running, a la The List of Adrian Messenger, and Sin City certainly boasts an aesthetic hook that’s firmly in gimmick territory. The film’s shot in black-and-white, but select characters and objects are rendered in bright color, reproducing the two-color scheme of Miller’s original strips. The whole affair takes place among jagged, extreme shadows and the kind of showy, ultra-storyboarded camera set-ups designed to make you choke on your Sour Patch Kids while blurting “Cooooooool!”; it’s eye-popping in the same insidious way that a Maroon 5 song is catchy. Stahl’s sickie Yellow Bastard is a rancid shade, there’s a dash of crimson lipstick, and the copious blood most often comes flowing out in pure, ropy white, making the fresh-slaughtered look like they’ve been on the receiving end of some wicked bukkake. Hearing about this visual hook, I could only think back to when I was a movie theater usher and my seemingly semi-retarded, 19-year-old co-worker told me that he’d written a feature script; he showed me the dog-eared pile of pages and explained that it was going to be shot in black-and-white but… with the blood in color! Just so we understand the level of thinking on display here.

This rancor might sound a little excessive, but then somebody’s got to be. It would be hysterical if it weren’t so depressing to listen to clueless critics line up to festoon this charmless trash with accolades, all the while pelting us with enthusiastic four-page spreads about the ascendance of nerd culture signaled by the mainstream dominance of Lord of the Rings, Batman, Star Wars, etc. Most are too excited at hitching their wagon onto this buzz subject to even once ask what this might mean. In reviews that just sparkle with affected naughty pride at having taken pleasure in such “disreputable” stuff—this is much the same crowd that congratulated itself for not flinching at Pulp Fiction —hacks strut their egalitarian taste, dressing up their numbskull prose in arbitrary, half-informed references to E.C. Comics, pulp literature, and grindhouse movies. Always good for a laugh, Roger Ebert offers that Sin City “isn’t an adaptation of a comic book, it’s like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids.” As to how this differentiates this from the vast majority of multiplex action fare isn’t quite clear; Miller, Rodriguez, and Tarantino (who guest-directs a car-chase scene in Sin City) aren’t doing a goddamn thing that the blockbuster hegemony hasn’t been doing for years—repackaging and domesticating the frightening, outré nastiness of B-list material, sprucing it up with A-list production values, and attaching it to bankable names.

But that patina of auteur credo makes a world of difference, and it seems like Tarantino and Rodriguez have become the “R. Mutt” signature on exploitation tropes. I’m pretty sure if you re-released Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Holocaust and gave Q.T. the director credit, more than a few eager to be “with it” dupes would suddenly find some kind of spry, postmodern undercurrent to all that vivisection. Maybe they’d even call it a celluloid mix-tape; it sure is a lot easier to regurgitate that helpful list of influences that comes in the press kit than to exercise any gray matter! And so it helps that Miller is a name artist, otherwise we might mistake the rote splatter-revenge fantasies in Sin City—excessive scenes of a character tied to a chair and absorbing torture are the movie’s chorus—as something off the pages of D.C. Comics’ nihilistically ultra-violent late-Eighties intergalactic bounty-hunter rag Lobo. If critics are going to insist on making comparisons, they should at least work on making them accurate. The hosannas for Sin City are as just embarrassing as the hysterical stuff from NME scribes who lob Gang of Four comparisons at every batch of thrift store fashion plates with disco drums. Jeanette Scott’s fussy, overcontrolled art direction in Sin City makes ludicrous any claim of connection to cheapo back-lot noir shot against gray balsa wood backdrops; a real paternity test reveals this film’s direct aesthetic forebears to be Alex Proyas’s orgies of grimy set design, The Crow and Dark City, the “cinematic” interludes in the Max Payne video games, and maybe just a dash of Pleasantville. The raw coffee-and-cigarettes voiceovers and rain-slicked everything are inherited from Spillane, Chandler and co., but they’re so hand-me-down threadbare as to be rendered unrecognizable. What’s left is just lowlife burlesque aimed squarely at folks who lap up real-life tough-guy ‘toons like Bukowski and bird-flicking, posterized Johnny Cash, a straight whiskey, no chaser hard-living fantasy for big kids who think 50 Cent’s too black.

To steer my screed away from a blanket indictment of comic flicks, I’ll say that all parties involved in Sin City could learn a valuable lesson from Michele Soavi’s 1995 Dellamorte Dellamore (released stateside with the unfortunate title Cemetary Man), inspired by the Italian newsstand comic Dylan Dog. Against the gray, unappealing flesh on display in Sin City, Soavi’s film has the exaggerated sensuality of a long, dark Rupert Everett rubbing up on the “she came at me in sections” physique of Anna Falchi; instead of shopworn urban grime atmospherics (naked lightbulbs, exposed pipes, carefully trash-strewn dead-end streets, you know the drill), Dellamorte provides an individual, idiosyncratic combination of sinewy, nasty violence, wry despair, and potent goth romanticism. It’s graphic but doesn’t rely on that to be synonymous with grown-up; pulpy, but never mired in its origins. The only chance it has at getting proper attention might be if Tarantino remakes it.