There's a lot of corruption in Sin City, but the protagonists' motivation ain't corrupt. In Sin City, the only reason anyone would be going out to look for a Maltese Falcon is if it was the only thing could help a beautiful woman sleep at night. Sure, the fella doin' the searching may have some selfish motives, i.e., if the lady wasn't so pretty, if maybe she had three nostrils and teeth like a shattered brick, probably he'd be less likely to go looking for this fucking bird thing, but nonetheless, he's doing it out of love, is what.

He's not doing it on account of she tricked him into it, but fuck it, she doesn't know that he's been tricking her all this time, and neither of them know the fucking Falcon has been tricking every one of them since before they even started, by not really existing at all.

They may be low-down sons a bitches up to the nuts in guts, but for the duration of their stories herein, they're honorable. Sin City doesn't share the cynicism of noir for a second. The world is fucked, says Sin City, but there are still genuinely good people who fuck up time to time, but they try.

In noir, the world may be fucked, but probably it's just these wretched bastards that been messing it up for everyone else.

But visually, y'see, it's all about the light and the shade, with emphasis on the shade.

It gets pretty dark at times out there in Sin City. Not least when we're in the company of Yellow Bastard, a hideously deformed paedophile of superhuman size and strength.

I gotta tell you, folks, for about seven or six minutes in the middle of Sin City, I started thinking along the lines of - How many more paedophiles can cinema offer us? Every way a fella turns he's bumping into The Woodsman or Capturing The Friedmans. Bad Education, too, has paedophilic subject matter. There's that new Todd Slondz number, and his Happiness from a while back had plenty paedophile sequences. The new Gregg Araki flick seems to have some sort of paedophilic undercurrent. Every which way a man looks nowadays, there's folks trying to force themselves on some child of some sort.

If Sin City has any kind of connection to any of those flicks, it would appear to be Happiness. In Slondz's film, the paedophile was just one more calculated shock in a film stuffed to the balls with empty, cynical attention-grabbing bullshit.

Similarly, whilst Sin City is a far superior film, the paedophile is just another low-down filthy motherfucker in a film filled with the cunts.