Sin City review

2005.04.11 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Sin City roared into theaters this week, the dark, raw, cruel depiction of a tough, corrupt town that breaks the back of every regular Joe and Jane that wanders into its slavering maw. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood, and other top names fight the bad fight and scrape and scrabble among the back alleys and brothels of the city that never weeps.

Rourke plays Marv, a tough guy on a rampage over the murder of the pretty squeeze occupying his bed, a girl that haunts him even as he avenges her. Owen is Dwight, a man with a mysterious past whose attempt to help a dame turns into the kind of mistake that bleeds in buckets. And Willis is Hartigan, an aging cop playing the chump in the name of the law, taking all the hell Sin City can dish out and asking for dessert.

Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico), the film is a roller coaster ride of avant garde comic book filmmaking that snatches the ink off the pages and slaps you around with it, like it or not.

And you better like it.

Rourke gives one of his best performances as the big lug who's not quite right in the head even if he is in the heart. His story is the centerpiece... and the most graphic and disturbing. Willis is fun, if a bit odd as the aging cop in ill health. He's built like a Panzer tank. Owen is well-cast as the mysterious good Samaritan who gets in over his head... literally.

The ladies all support, altho they do a hell of a job. Dawson is a bit 1980s-Sheila-E for the pulp setting, but does a fine job, and Brittany Murphy and Jessica Alba hold their own. Devon Aoki is like a beautiful, mute, angel of death, saving whom she chooses and destroying whom she chooses.

It's really an ensemble tour de force, with terrific-but-minor parts for Nick Stahl, Carla Gugino, Elijah Wood, Alexis Bledel, Michael Madsen, and Rutger Hauer. The acting is purposesly a bit stiff and over-the-top (which helps those who won't be winning Oscars anytime soon) and simultaneously mimics Old Hollywood while creating an era that never was.

Miller and Rodriguez really do a great job of creating memorable characters. There's enough character and story here for at least three movies. But the story-telling doesn't feel rushed or half-baked. We just wish we could spend a little more time getting to know each of these characters, some of whom apparently have back-stories as deep as the one we're watching. Luckily, it appears that we'll get more both on the DVD release and in sequels that explore Miller's other graphic novels.

Is it great? It's crime pulp at its finest. Is it perfect? Not so fast, junior.

I found myself occasionally confused by the Tarantino-esque time-shifting of sequences. I'm still not sure what the Josh Hartnett frame story was all about. And seeing the Elijah Wood character again near the end, well after his story has played out, only distracted me with recalculations of the timeline.

I also didn't care for the casual mixing of eras. Cops dress like modern SWAT teams but drive cars from the 1950s. Others drive cars from the 60s and even the 80s. Nobody seems to have heard of computers, but some characters talk on cell phones. It was hard to know what to expect, so I started to expect anything, which leaves little room for surprise.

I would like to have seen more interweaving of the stories, too, but the only connection was the setting of Basin City, particularly the club Kadie's, run by strippers and prostitutes. Since it was clear that they existed in the same time and place (unlike other episodic movies like Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone), I kept looking for the main characters to cross paths and throw a wrench into each other's stories, but Miller and Rodriguez keep them almost completely separate.

Technically, Sin City is further proof that digital filmmaking is here now and not going away. Rodriguez is a big fan of it and even persuaded Quentin Tarantino to direct a sequence (Owen and Del Toro in the car) in digital rather than Tarantino's beloved film stock. The live action, green screen, and digital effects blend seamlessly, altho the highly stylized approach is naturally pretty forgiving.

Stylistically, Sin City is a bloody, violent, sometimes cartoony crime pulp, presented mostly in black and white, with touches of color added. It's a good thing, too, because all that blood would have been sickening in full color. It's not the utter blood bath of Kill Bill, but it is darker, rougher, and willing to delve into the dark places of mankind's soul.

As if mankind had one.

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