By Woodrow J. Hinton

Bruce Willis' flaccid performance dooms Sin City.

The most beautiful raindrops you will ever see onscreen are in Sin City, co-director Robert Rodriguez's elaborate but only partly successful adaptation of Frank Miller's (who co-directs) series of comic book crime stories. The raindrops are fat and shimmering; they strike the black and white pavement of Basin City, the film's gritty locale, with musical rhythm. The effect is dazzling, but only momentary. When raindrops make a bigger impact than Sin City's human inhabitants, you quickly realize that the film is in serious trouble.

Sin City begins on a high-rise balcony in the thick of a downtown skyline and continues to cover every imaginable noir backdrop -- smoky strip clubs, shadowy back alleys, a vacant dock at the city wharf and a curving road in the hilltops overlooking the city.

Josh Hartnett makes good use of his youthful, handsome face as a friendly partygoer who sees a quiet balcony as an opportunity for escaping a crowded party and meeting a pretty woman. There's an unexpected death. Then again, Sin City is chock full of bloodletting.

Beautiful women like Goldie (Jaime King) -- the first in a long parade of vamping femme fatales -- capture our attention. Goldie's red dress is the only splash of color in her black-and-white scenes. Her red dress also matches her deep red lips. She is stunning in all the right ways. Yet, one look at Goldie reveals all the highs and lows of the vacant Sin City. Despite its laundry list of classic film noir ingredients -- crooked cops, noble crooks, hookers with hearts of gold, dedicated detectives and dangerous killers -- the film is more graphic design than motion picture story.

Everything about Sin City looks classic noir, but the film's feel, spirit and overboard extravagance smacks of another unbalanced Hollywood blockbuster. Sin City has plenty of surface sparkle, but little dramatic meat on its bones.

Sin City ran for 13 months as an anthology comic and writer/artist Frank Miller revisited the stories as a series of acclaimed graphic novels. Three of Miller's plots form the Sin City movie, but only one of them, the story of thuggish criminal Marv (Mickey Rourke under layers of thick makeup) and his devotion to the beautiful Goldie, is worth all the time, energy and special effects dollars spent by Rodriguez, Miller and guest director Quentin Tarantino.

In "That Yellow Bastard," the main storyline in Sin City, Bruce Willis is Hartigan, the veteran police detective counting the hours until his retirement from the Basin City Police Department. He is a cop with a bum ticker and a crisscross scar across his broad forehead, symbols of his self-sacrificing dedication to his job. Michael Madsen is Hartigan's raspy-voiced partner.

The double crosses begin the moment Hartigan tracks down a creep who's kidnapped an 11-year-old girl named Nancy Callahan. Their confrontation takes place on an empty dock at the grim city wharf, but that's just the beginning of Hartigan and Nancy's story. They reunite years later. Hartigan is older and more worn. Nancy has grown into a sexy stripper (sexpot Jessica Alba in leather chaps and a twirling lasso).

Willis looks the part as the roughhewn Hartigan, which means he's more set piece than performer. He provides plenty of throaty narration but little else. There's no presence to Willis, much like the comic page character he's portraying. You see right through him. Granted, Hartigan is a man living on borrowed time, but Willis makes him weaker than any hero cop has a right to be. Hartigan holds a limp gun, or at least Willis makes the sacrificing cop appear flaccid and ineffective. When Nancy leaps into Hartigan's arms and smothers him with a long kiss, the effect is laughable. Not because Hartigan is old enough to be her father, but because you're convinced that Hartigan is incapable of getting aroused.

The same thing is true for Alba, who's pretty but transparent as the grown-up Nancy. She gyrates against a strip club pole like a veteran showgirl, but nothing beats beneath her curves and pouting lips. Like her on-screen chaperone, Alba looks the part. Yet whether spouting the film's pulpy dialogue or dodging bullets in a car chase, she never manages a moment that's real, dramatic or suspenseful. If Willis and Alba spent less time on screen, perhaps, Rodriguez and team might have achieved their goals with Sin City.

Monochrome colors pay homage to Sin City's comic page origins and key stories like "That Yellow Bastard," but it's a look Warren Beatty accomplished years ago with his big-screen adaptation, Dick Tracy. Sin City is shot and cut by Robert Rodriguez, and he deserves credit for sticking true to the film's comic origins and trying to create something unique. The blood is white cream that spreads across the screen like ink on a comic book page. The action unfolds in spurts, much like turning comic pages.

Sin City is a lush and extravagant film noir, which is a contradiction in spirit and true meaning of the genre of these low-budget movies, most released in the years after World War II, that felt livelier and truer because of their limited resources.

Sin City is anything but cheap yet, by its conclusion, you wish it were. If Sin City were a low budget film, perhaps, Rodriguez would have emphasized storytelling over his dizzy camerawork.

At least the people surrounding Willis and Alba match better with the pulp fiction material. Nick Stahl is perfectly sinister as the shaggy-haired creep with his eye on Nancy. Benicio Del Toro brings an energetic boost as a manic criminal with a taste for hookers. Jaime King, like all the women of Sin City -- Alexis Bledel, Rosario Dawson, Carla Gugino and Brittany Murphy -- looks the part of the femme fatale. Goldie's lovemaking takes place in a heart-shaped bed and, when Marv describes his time with Goldie as time spent with an angel, you are reluctant to disagree. In grim Basin City, a beauty like Goldie is a welcome angel.

Sin City brims with beautiful woman, but its true star is Mickey Rourke. As the vengeful Marv, a loser willing to risk all for a woman he loves, Rourke has the hard-knock voice Sin City needs and a relentless energy that reveals just how ineffectual Willis and Alba are.

Few will recognize Rourke under his thick makeup and numerous bandages, but he's the one true thing in Sin City. He sacrifices appearances for the story, something his prettier co-stars would never consider. Grade: C-