Overall Rating
  Awesome: 60.5%
Worth A Look: 16.61%
Average: 4.7%
Pretty Bad: 11.29%
Total Crap: 6.9%
18 reviews, 211 user ratings
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| Sin City |
by Robert Flaxman
"Ugly as sin."
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At one point in Sin City, the character Hartigan (Bruce Willis) compares himself to a fly whose wings have been pulled off, now being tortured for sheer sport. Watching the film, it’s not hard to picture a young Robert Rodriguez as a child who would do that to a fly, such glee does he take in shooting, stabbing, maiming and killing all of his characters. Sin City’s problem isn’t exactly its violence, though; it’s the lack of context for that violence and how it is depicted and represented – as just about the coolest thing its director can imagine.Here’s a series of questions that will help explain the major problems of Sin City. When you make a film with superhuman, one-dimensional characters, is that realistic? If the characters aren’t believable, what motivation do we have to care about them? And if we don’t care about them, why should we see the film’s violence as anything other than reprehensible bloodsport?
Take the lead of one of the film’s three stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke). Marv bounds off rooftops like he’s Spider-Man, crashes through the windshield of a police cruiser at high speed and is unharmed, and at one point takes dozens of bullets to the chest and doesn’t die. It would be naive to expect total realism from an action film, but this isn’t even marginal realism. When Marv pulls a barred window out of the wall at one point, we might as well be watching the Hulk in action.
Marv’s character is a minimal sketch as well – he’s a tough guy ex-con who has decided to become the avenger of a prostitute for whose murder he was framed. Okay, I guess – except evidently this requires killing everyone within three square miles. But it’s okay because he loved her! By which I mean, she slept with him once. That’s love.
But then, pretty much all the characters are like that, because Sin City isn’t about character development, it’s about shoot-em-up, blood-gushing violence. Like his buddy Quentin Tarantino, who serves as “special guest director” on one scene (my guess is the one that makes violence and death even more “hilarious” than the rest of the film does), Rodriguez doesn’t seem to think much of violence. It’s by and large a big joke to him. People around me in the theater burst out laughing on numerous occasions, which was kind of alarming as Sin City’s few witty lines are usually delivered right before or after somebody kills somebody else, usually in spectacularly bloody fashion.
Indeed, the narratives are driven near-exclusively by violence. Without it, there would be no story. Even in that restrictive space, Rodriguez and Frank Miller (creator of the original graphic novels and given co-credit for both the direction and writing) manage to cram in unnecessarily distasteful tidbits like making Elijah Wood’s character a cannibal, not one but two beheadings, and a scene in which Hartigan literally rips a man’s genitalia off.
Even Kill Bill, with all its sword-wielding ninjas and eye-plucking, wasn’t this disgraceful. That film was pretty much all about violence too, but at its heart it had some real emotions, however minimal and hidden behind a wall of blood. Sin City has no such heart of gold. It attempts to fake it in a couple of places, but with its characters these scenes fall flat. Two of the three “heroes” are killing machine ex-cons who happen to be overly chivalrous. This is supposed to make them lovable somehow?
The one hint of emotion in the film is brought on by Hartigan’s relationship with Nancy (Makenzie Vega, sister of Spy Kids’ Alexa), whom he saves from rape and murder at age 11. Having been framed because the attempted killer had powerful relatives, Hartigan spends eight years in jail to find that Nancy is now Jessica Alba, an almost-exotic dancer. The film proceeds to turn the familial affection into a tawdry, off-putting sexual relationship which fortunately is nipped in the bud by a re-emergence of the killer. So much for having a heart; when Sin City isn’t pouring blood, it’s thinking exclusively with its crotch.
I guess if you like this sort of thing, then Sin City is your movie event of the year. It certainly has an interesting visual style, with its pointed use of color and frequent aping of Miller’s drawing style. In fact, the whole thing was shot against a green screen to facilitate this, which probably explains why so much of the acting is so mediocre – people have apparently learned nothing from the Star Wars prequels. Of course, good acting is not generally expected of an action film either.
So who cares if Sin City is just a mindlessly violent action flick with no heart or brain? People should. It would be one thing if Rodriguez or Miller exhibited even the sense that they might be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s never there. The violence is deadly serious and yet is sometimes delivered with a creepy sense of humor that makes it seem not wry but sadistic. Furthermore, because nothing ever really exists outside of the violence, the film fails to have an actual excuse for its bloodshed. Most action films present at least a framing device that explains where the violence comes from; Sin City throws up its hands and says, “Well, who cares why, let’s just have a bunch of people get killed for no reason.” That’s not a movie, it’s three levels of Grand Theft Auto.Far too shallow for its violence to have any potential excuse and far too twisted to have its heroes’ slightly good intentions provide the bloodshed with a possible redemption, the film is a fairly good-looking outside with an interior so ugly and hollow that it actually makes the outside pretty much worthless. Stylish literally to a fault, Sin City’s moral repugnance only makes its attempts to be cool look worse.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11918&reviewer=385
originally posted: 04/06/05 14:41:10
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USA
01-Apr-2005 (R)
DVD: 13-Dec-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Jul-2005
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