Forget The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke's great comeback role is Marv, the most hard-core noir hero among the three protagonists of Frank Miller and co-director Robert Rodriguez's 2005 film Sin City, which is now available in a must-have Blu-ray two-disc set. (If you don't have Blu-ray, buy it for this eye-popping movie.)

Tough as it is to recognize the gorgeous young Mickey Rourke of Diner and Body Heat in The Wrestler, it's even harder to recognize him in Sin City. His face is encased in makeup that spackles in the gap between his forehead and his nose, and extends his jutting, Kirk Douglas-esque chin so that his profile forms a semicircle. Critic Ken Tucker says, "He looks like a chunk of granite abandoned by a sculptor." His profile reminds me of one of the incredibly cool knives fashioned for the film -- a sharp, swooping shape like a clawed scimitar. Wicked. Rourke makes the guy kinetic, despite the frequent absurdity of his James Ellroy-drunk-on-Chandler dialogue and over-the-top comic-book antics, performing and surviving violence nobody ever survived outside of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Marv finds himself in bed with the drop-dead beautiful blond hooker of his dreams, who has, alas, dropped dead. He's framed for the murder, and as the cops close in he starts hunting for the real bad guys. The other two good guys are Bruce Willis as a dying cop hunting the pedophile son (Nick Stahl) of a vile Senator (Powers Boothe), and Clive Owen, who protects Shellie (Brittany Murphy) from evil cop Benicio Del Toro by putting a razor to Benicio's eyeball, a la Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's An Andalusian Dog, and murmuring, "I'm Shellie's new boyfriend, and I'm out of my mind."

Frank Miller is too, and this three or four-decker sandwich of a movie is his aesthetic declaration of independence. His graphic novel stressing the Dark Knight's noir side inspired Tim Burton's breakthrough 1989 Batman movie, which helped get him work on the RoboCop sequels (whose amazingly cool guns are re-used in Sin City).

But Miller felt screwed by Hollywood and swore off movies until Rodriguez wooed him back. Theirs is a beautiful relationship, because Rodriguez was remarkably faithful to the black-and-white fantasies of Miller's original graphic-novel version of Sin City and fantastically imaginative in recreating them with live-action and color-splashed computer graphics with none of the weightlessness CG often imparts. Everything in Sin City packs a punch. Cannibalism, decapitation, people flung through shattering windshields of cool old cars, roaming bands of vengeance-crazed hookers wielding Mongolian bows with razor arrowheads -- what's not to like?

The insanely complicated (yet not actually confusing) stories play out at breakneck speed -- you can't believe it's 124 minutes long -- and you want to see more. So Disney indulged you, and included not only the original movie (with informative commentary by Miller and Rodriguez, and less incisive commentary by chatterbox Quentin Tarantino, who directed one scene with Owen and Del Toro's dead, yakking head), but a second disc with 23 extra minutes of unrated, previously unseen footage, edited into four chapters you can watch individually, or in sequence. On disc one, there's also a "Cine-Explore" feature that lets you see picture-in-picture glimpses of green-screen footage and original Miller art, so you can compare and see how the movie scenes' magic was made.

I liked the brief features. "A Hard Top With a Decent Engine: The Cars of Sin City" reveals why they used a 1937 Cadillac instead of a replica of the Yellow Bastard's car from the original graphic novel. (The car is a Bugatti 57C Atlantic costing $9.7 million; it rents for $100,000 a week). I loved "Booze, Broads, and Guns: The Props of Sin City. (Did you know they borrowed one of the 118 Kill Bill swords from Quentin's garage for use in this movie, and that Quentin's detail-oriented freakishness was what ruined that movie? He made better films before he could afford $65,000 sword budgets). I was fascinated by "Making the Monsters: Special Effects Make-Up" and lukewarm about "Trench Coats & Fishnets: The Costumes of Sin City."

My only disappointment with this visually pyrotechnic, quite stylish, elegantly two-fisted gore fest is "Kill 'em Good Interactive Comic Book," a game that lets you race and crash cars and savor other scenes from the film. I couldn't master it -- I kept crashing -- because I couldn't get into it. It's a diverting miniature, but it's not a proper game.

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