Blood sport: 'Sin City' & 'Walk on Water'.

Nowadays, flesh-and-blood actors can share the screen with cartoon characters (Who Killed Roger Rabbit?) or a bunch of human performers can emote in front of computer-generated backdrops (Gladiator). Movie protagonists may now wrangle electronic animals, wield props that are really graphics, shed digital blood.

Sin City carries this technical wizardry further than any previous film I have seen. It had to. Robert Rodriguez set himself the task not only of adapting three of Frank Miller's graphic novels but of recreating the very panels of the comic strip layouts. (And for that reason, Rodriguez gave Miller credit as co-director, since Miller's panels provided the composition of almost every shot.) Rodriguez could cast Mickey Rourke as a hulking bruiser but computer graphics supplied most of Rourke's musculature. The actresses are certainly pretty but the computer sculpted their calendar-girl figures. Back in 1964, when Audrey Hepburn couldn't quite do the songs of My Fair Lady, the producer could dub her with Marni Nixon's voice. But now, moviemakers can visually dub in muscles and hourglass curves. The effect is outre but technically seamless.

Perhaps more important is the now perfected means of using color and black-and-white within the same shot, so that the black-and-white area of the screen becomes a color in itself and thus expands the cinematographer's spectrum. For instance, when the lonely brute played by Rourke mourns the murdered dame on his bed, her corpse is a vision of ivory skin and red hair, while he and the rest of his crummy apartment are in noir-ish black and white.

That said, I must report that Sin City is a terrible movie, the sort of monstrosity a talented director makes when he so concentrates on the technical aspects of his project that he loses control over its most important component: the story itself.

Influenced by Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino even guest-directs a car chase), Rodriguez has tried to make his separate stories interlock. But, unlike Pulp Fiction, the segments of Sin City are all too similar in plot and tone: hard guys avenging or rescuing curvaceous beauties with ultrasadism. So there's no contrast and therefore no variety. And, though characters from one story reappear in another, the reappearances have no significance, so there's no true narrative dovetailing or accretion of meaning. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino snapped his various episodes into alignment with the framing device of the restaurant stick-up, in which violence was averted and at least one character found redemption. Sin City also employs a framing device but it does nothing but add one more corpse to the body count.

The atmospherics of Sin City--the skyscrapers, the muscle cars, the trench-coats, the shadowy alley-ways, the dingy apartment houses--are meant to evoke film noir and pulpy detective fiction of the 1930s and '40s, but the movie's gross violence makes it nearer kin to the horror comic books of the 1950s. They were bad enough, but to have to watch a big screen, thirty-feet-high Bruce Willis tear a psycho's genitals off--hey, that's entertainment! When maniac heroes are indistinguishable from maniac villains, the result is monotony, as is the case with Sin City. It's been a long time since such a violent movie exuded such boredom.

It is hardly news that suspense movies don't need ultraviolence, but it's nice to be reminded of that by a film as good as Walk on Water.

Its hero, Eyal, is a Mossad agent and we see him plying his trade right at the film's start as he kills a Hamas terrorist before the eyes of his victim's wife and little son. The murder is shocking enough, but the truly wrenching moments of this sequence come before and after the assassination. As Eyal fills a syringe with poison in the privacy of a restroom, he looks at himself in a mirror. The superb actor Lior Ashkenazi makes it clear what that look means: the secret agent is checking his most important equipment, his nerves. Can he bear to kill again? Certainly; why not? It's patriotic, necessary work. And as the father falls dead and Eyal speeds away in a car, the Palestinian child, barely comprehending what's happened, stares vacantly after the vanishing vehicle. Then something stirs in his face. The earlier close-up of Eyal links with the one of the boy as a nexus of terrible awakenings: the rearousal of focused murderousness in the man and the initiation of hatred in the boy.

The assassin comes home to find his wife has killed herself and, long before Eyal reveals the contents of her suicide note, we may suspect that she was shriveled by what her husband's profession has turned him into. He tries to escape his grief by immersing himself in a new espionage project, but his elderly spymaster, Menachem, reassigns him to the surveillance of Pia, a young German expatriate to Israel, and her visiting brother, Axel. They are the grandchildren of an escaped Nazi monster, surely dead of old age by now, but Menachem insists that the young people may lead Eyal to the old man: "I want to get him before God does." Though suspecting that he is being sidetracked until his bosses are reassured of his nerves, the dark, clenched Eyal poses as a tour guide and insinuates himself into the lives of these blonde, open-faced, boundlessly naive Germans.

Up to this point we seem to be in Graham Greene/John le Carre country because the espionage action is underpinned by moral probing and complex emotions. But then writer Gal Uchovsky and director Eytan Fox do something daring. For a good fifty minutes (half of Water's running time) they drain their movie of its espionage tension and we simply watch three people circling, observing, and flirting with one another. Eyal, resenting such an innocuous assignment, regards the rich kids bemusedly, mockingly, and, finally, affectionately. Behind their backs he calls them "Hansel and Gretel," and derides their good German liberal attempts to bond with both Jews and Palestinians, yet he is also fascinated by the couple, because their strenuous openness seems to challenge his fortress personality. Though Eyal bugs their apartment and reports his findings to headquarters, the secret agent knows that, for all practical purpose, he is on holiday. There is no way these kids can lead him to a Nazi monster. Chaper-one to a "patronizing German peacenik" (whose open gayness discomfits Eyal) and a woman who thinks all Israeli men are "impossible," Eyal settles into his assignment and resigns himself to the mixed feelings it arouses in him.

Then the electronic bug catches something startling that Pia says to Axel. And that something packs Axel back to Germany with Eyal close on his trail. So are we now back in the world of secret agents and contemplated murder? You bet. There's even a karate fight ahead as Eyal takes on skinheads in a Berlin subway. Is this a disappointment after all the relaxed character development and witty banter and quiet walks on beaches and flirtations over cafe tables? Not at all. For the detour into quiet drama has annealed our sympathies to the characters and revealed their complexities. In their physical excitement and startling reversals, the closing scenes may veer close to melodrama, but the action doesn't dissolve the characterizations. Rather, the reality of the characters certifies the melodrama and makes it all the more thrilling.