In the early days of cinema, a filmed theatre play, or "canned theatre", was a popular and quick way to bring theatre to a wider audience and one outside of large urban centers. In these productions, the camera would simulate the eyes of a spectator sitting in an expensive seat in the front row of an actual theatre. The result was not cinema as much as a poor, flat replica of a stage production minus the plasticity, unpredictability and immediacy of the actual play. Although Rodriguez's film is much more than a camera recording of an invisible hand flipping the pages of one of the Frank Miller's graphic novels, it is perhaps not too much of an overstatement to call it "canned comics". Like "canned theatre", Sin City takes many of the elements that work in the form of a comic, and mimics them on celluloid. The Sin City website even has a section that compares frames from the comic with those from the film, as if a perfect similarity was somehow equal to a perfect film. If that was true, a perfect film adaptation of Picasso's 'Guernica' could be created with a two-hour still frame that uncannily resembled the massive painting.

Another problem that Rodriguez created for himself upon conceiving the idea of a Sin City film was the notion that he could cram a handful of graphic novels, each with its own plot and characters, into a motion picture running slightly more than two hours. For an entirely unfair comparison, imagine some ambitious writer and director taking upon himself the monumental task of creating a film adapted from several Dickens novels, simply because they take place in the same city and period. Is it madness, or is it possible? On the basis of Sin City, it's the former. History, Eugene Vale and Aristotle suggest that one dramatic work should have one main plot, from which everything else stems and which propels the story. On the other hand, experience shows that this is not always the case, and films have been made that fly in the face of conventional ideas about structure. Regardless, the problem with Sin City is that it doesn't work and it doesn't work because it has a weak plot structure and weak characters. Constructed like four consecutive episodes of a television show (though David Lynch managed to make a whole out of some spare TV parts with Mulholland Drive), none of the characters are truly developed and no one plotline strong enough to carry the film. Characters and plots disappear, appear, but never connect in any meaningful way. Attempts are made at thematic unity through motifs (Men defending women, betrayal, corruption, etc.) and the repetition of certain lines of dialogue, but it's superficial and forced. The main unifying factor, as can be deemed from the title, is The City, but that, like the film, has a style but no heart or soul. Near the end, Rodriguez even resorts to showing various characters from the three main stories together in a bar in a feeble attempt at tying things together. But string don't hold elephants. Not surprisingly, the film has an incredibly weak ending.