Sin City
- Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
- Written by Frank Miller
- Starring Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba and Benicio Del Toro
- Classification: 18A
Sin City gives sin a great name — it's never been more plentiful or looked so gorgeous. What a visually stunning film this is. Straight from the opening frame, you're plunged into a world that seems eerily familiar and yet totally different, not (like so many before it) a comic book turned into a quasi-realistic movie, but a movie determined to remain a surrealistic comic book. And remain it does. With the hyperbolic characters fleshed out by a starry cast of live actors, yet the bleak urban settings painted in entirely by digital imagery, the cells of the comic appear to pop up like faithful storyboards right onto the screen. The result? Well, if your idea of heaven is paging through the noir-ish hell of Frank Miller's graphic novels, then welcome to heaven at 24 frames per second.
In fact, welcome to two unadulterated hours of eye-popping sin, presided over by director Robert Rodriguez, whose bursts of talent in previous outings (El Mariachi to the original Spy Kids) have coalesced here into the full satanic majesty. Rodriguez has allotted a co-directing credit to Miller, and even includes a shout-out to his buddy Quentin Tarantino for a "special guest" turn behind the camera (an auteur cameo measurable in nanoseconds). But all that's just so much marketing gimmickry. Make no mistake: From the first sultry broad to the last crooked cop, Sin City is Rodriguez's cinematic baby.
A deformed baby, to be sure. That's because the source material plays like pulpy noir with a thyroid condition, a Chandleresque pastiche that takes the raw stuff of the genre — the cut of a thug's jaw, the curve of a moll's breast, the cadence of a wise-guy's patter — and magnifies it a hundredfold. Appropriately, Rodriguez shoots this netherworld in black and white, but with the high-definition contrasts amped up to Everest proportions, until the blacks are as deep as pitch and the whites like driven snow. Yet both are supplemented by occasional flashes of vibrant colour — a Cadillac's royal blue fin, an addict's mustard-yellow pill, a she-devil's hot-pink dress, a bullet-hole's cherry-red ooze. Amid the otherwise stark chaos of Sin City, a glimpse of colour is never redemptive — it's just hell in a different hue.
So much for the glorious look of the pulp, but what about the narrative timbre of the fiction? The script weaves together three bloody episodes from the comic canon. You might just guess the tone from their titles — The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, That Yellow Bastard (although I like to think of them collectively as The Miller's Tales).
Anyway, each features a hard-boiled male, the usual trench-coat titan mired somewhere between anti and hero, who's motivated by the love of a dame, and who wades through a bog of bad guys in order to rescue her if she's still alive, or avenge her if she isn't — either seems just fine with him.
On this he-manly side of the ledger, the trio differ in technique but not in mood — they all battle evil with an evil glee. There, we count Hartigan, the aging flatfoot with a bum ticker (Bruce Willis in deadpan form); Marv, the prodigious hulk with a head the size and consistency of a glacial deposit (Mickey Rourke buried in latex but with a performance that rises to picture-stealing heights); and Dwight, the ex-photojournalist with the touched-up face (Clive Owen taking an unfortunately thin role in the thinnest of the three yarns).
