Everything about it is so reprehensible -- mindless gun worship, nonstop violence, graphic bloodshed, sado-misogyny, caricatures not characters, every verbal cliche in the (comic) book. I'm ashamed of myself for enjoying it like hell.

		'Sin City' Rating: R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content Starring: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Elijah Wood, Benicio Del Toro, Jaime King Director: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino

Hell, indeed, is the wages of "Sin City," Frank Miller's seedy cartoon inferno, where the devil is an equal opportunity tormentor of villains and heroes alike. Be they mortal or venial violators, they all get what's comin' to 'em. What's comin' to us is a stunningly stylized noir spectacle with a fabulously original look and feel.

The co-director of "Sin City" is Robert Rodriguez. That's an odd way to put it because this is an odd situation: Not one, not two, but three guys get direction credit -- the others being Miller himself (more or less honorary) and Quentin Tarantino (for one scene). But Rodriguez ("Once Upon a Time in Mexico," "Spy Kids") did the real work -- and also wrote, photographed and edited this wildly violent yarn, based on three semi-related "graphic novels" (a fancy term for comic-book stories aimed at adults) by Miller, a major innovator in that genre: His amalgamated triptych of "The Hard Goodbye," "The Big Fat Kill" and "That Yellow Bastard" disdains super-heroes for anti-heroes -- post-modern Bogarts and hardboiled femmes, reluctant vigilantes "still trying to do the right thing in a city that refuses to care," we're told -- dangerously, which is to say humorously, close to Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir" intro.

Behind door and story No. 1 is sad-sack John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), "the last honest cop in Sin City," who has a bum ticker and one last job -- to rescue beautiful 11-year-old Nancy from imminent rape and murder by the deranged son of an evil senator. He'll do hard time and get the electric chair for his pains, but there aren't enough volts to fully fry this diehard.

Door No. 2 -- and everything else in his way -- is smashed to smithereens by Marv (Mickey Rourke), a flat-faced hulk whose goddess-girlfriend, Goldie (Jaime King), suddenly goes from red-hot lively to stone-cold dead in his bed. Who's framing Marv? A good candidate is (Frodo no mo') Elijah Wood, the kung-fu cannibal who mounts his victims' heads trophy-like on the wall and eats the rest of them.

Good guy No. 3 is Dwight (Clive Owen), a private eye determined to save his favorite scantily clad gang of hookers from a psychopath we thought was disposed of in episode No. 1. Not that these dom dames need his help -- least of all, Gail the Boss (Rosario Dawson). How empowered is this valkyrie? Gail makes Brunhilde look like Laura Bush. And Dwight also has to deal with Jackie Boy (the wonderful Benicio Del Toro), whose mouth never stops -- even when he's beheaded.

That's Tarantino's scene, by the way, and it's entertaining enough, but not up to the hype and hoopla surrounding his premature Orson Wellesian genius status, which is only a bit less overblown than Orson.

What's stupendous and does live up to its hype and hoopla is Rodriguez's black-and-white photography, highlighted only minimally with "spot" color -- Goldie's yellow hair, a dominatrix's baby-blue eyes, Dwight's red tennis shoes -- utilizing color for characterization instead of decoration. For that matter, all of Rodriguez's imaging, jump-cut and digital F/X techniques are hugely effective in creating this dream-nightmare silhouette of a universe.

If only it weren't so self-consciously aware of its own grandiosity -- and so long.

And if there's any redeeming social value in this celebration of perversity, I couldn't tell you what it is. It sends every bad message imaginable. True to comic-book surreality, bullets never kill anybody (Willis takes 50); you can get run over three times or hurled from a 30-story building -- and live to fight again. The filmmakers actually send up this convention themselves, with Wood's limb-chopping -- just as absurd, if not quite as hilarious, as the knight's in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." This is one R-rating that MUST be enforced -- children and young teens should be kept away at all costs.

But neither mounted police nor anything else will keep cutting-edge film buffs from entering "Sin City."