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 Peter Sobczynski
"Robert Rodriguez finally makes his masterpiece"
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“There’s no settling down. There’s going to be blood for blood and by the gallons. It’s the old days. The bad days. The all-or-nothing days. They’re back. There’s no choices left and I’m ready for war.”Read the above quote again and let it simmer in your mind for a moment for hidden within those words is the key to whether or not you will like “Sin City.” If you find them to be the most ridiculously purple of prose and sneer that no real person would ever say them aloud, then “Sin City” is simply not for you. There is no shame to that and I am sure that if you go to the screen next door, you will find dialogue more “realistic” (i.e. just as artificial, but not as blatantly so) and to your liking in the likes of “Miss Congeniality 2" or “Ice Princess.” However, if you are like me and reading those words puts a silly grin on your face and conjures up images of film noir heaven–a black-and-white world where the men are tough and broad-shouldered, the dames are tough but soft-shouldered and such dialogue, usually uttered between puffs of cigarette smoke, belts of whiskey or winces of pain, is the rule rather than the exception, then you are going to adore “Sin City” with every fiber of your being. This is the most shamelessly entertaining American movie in many a moon–at least since the “Kill Bill” saga–and at times, it feels as if Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller have not just made a mere movie, they have somehow figured out how to tap into your mind and transferred your ultimate fantasy noir film from your dreams to the screen virtually intact.
Based on Miller’s series of hard-boiled graphic novels, “Sin City” takes three of his best-known stories and weaves them into a two-fisted trilogy of bullets, babes and bon mots, along with not one, but two prologues to boot. In the first, Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton meet on a rooftop overlooking the vistas of Basin City and share a romantic rendezvous that does not quite go as anticipated. The second features Bruce Willis as Hartigan, an over-the-hill cop (“Pushing 60 with a bum ticker”) who, on his last day before retirement, battles a treacherous partner (Michael Madsen), an even-more treacherous heart condition and a hail of bullets in order to save 11-year-old Nancy Callahan from the clutches of a depraved pedophile/murderer (Nick Stahl) who is the untouchable scion of the Roarks, the most powerful family in town. For his troubles, Hartigan is falsely accused of abusing Nancy himself and sent to prison, though not before removing the pedophile’s chief weapon at point-blank range.
In the first full tale, the monstrous thug Marv (Mickey Rourke, looking like Rondo Hatton’s less-attractive sibling) goes on a rampage of revenge when sweet-faced hooker Goldie (Jamie King) treats him to one night of passion and winds up murdered later that evening. (This is the act that inspires the quote that kicked off this review.) The second centers on Dwight (Clive Owen), who tries to protect his girlfriend (Brittany Murphy) from an abusive ex-boyfriend (Benicio Del Toro) despite the slight complication of being, as he himself puts it, “out of my mind”; this act sends him on a blood-drenched path that takes him from the depths of the local tar pits to the roofs of the sleazy Old Town neighborhood, where another ex-girlfriend, the deadly prostitute (Rosario Dawson) is preparing, with her fellow working girls (including Devon Aoki and Alexis Bledel), to defend her turf from intruders by any means necessary. (Picture Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” video as directed by John Woo.) Finally, Hartigan, who was falsely accused of abusing Nancy himself and imprisoned for eight years, is suddenly released from jail and, convinced that she is in danger, goes to seek her out. He tracks her down to the bar where she (Jessica Alba) is a stripper so beloved that she apparently isn’t required to actually strip. (After seeing her cowgirl routine, however, few will complain.) Nancy is delighted to see her knight in shining armor but Hartigan realizes, too late, that instead of rescuing her from danger by tracking her down, he has actually put her in it by allowing another dark figure from her past to follow his tracks.
Because it tells three overlapping stories that feature colorful dialogue, grisly violence and an eclectic cast that combines big stars and relatively overlooked performers, there will no doubt be many comparisons between “Sin City” and “Pulp Fiction,” the 1994 instant classic that revolutionized the film industry and inspired legions of clones and knock-offs. There are other points of comparison as well. One of the intriguing things about the film is the way that the various stories start off following the hoariest genre cliches, only to quickly spin off in wildly unanticipated directions. The story with Marv begins as a standard noir revenge drama but soon turns into the kind of tale that wouldn’t have seen out of place in “E.C. Comics” with the introduction of a silent-but-deadly young man (Elijah Wood) with extremely peculiar tastes. Even stranger is the second tale, in which Dwight’s psychosis leads to an unforgettable sequence (as it turns out, the very one “guest directed” by Quentin Tarantino) in which he and another character have an extended conversation that works both as a little masterpiece of humor and horror and as a sly tribute to a certain Sam Peckinpah classic (though to specify the title would be to spoil the joke). As for the Hartigan sequence, it too has its moments of weirdness once the identity of the villain in revealed, but gets most of its dramatic sparks from taking the innocent lass/grizzled antihero relationship and bringing the sexual subtext of such portrayals to the surface.
However, the most important element that “Sin City” shares with “Pulp Fiction” is the sense of exuberance and sheer joy of filmmaking. Co-directors Rodriguez and Miller are clearly in love with the material and jazzed to have the opportunity to bring it to the screen and that excitement is evident in every one of the film’s 124 minutes. Using a combination of clever editing, black-and-white digital photography (with judicious selections of color sprinkled throughout) and striking sets and backgrounds created almost entirely on computers, they have created a comic-book adaptation that comes closer to approximating the visual style of the source material than any other such film that I can recall seeing. The result is an absolute feast for the eyes–I can’t think of a single uninteresting image–and does more than any other film in recent memory has to remind viewers that there are few sights as arresting as black-and-white photography. For Rodriguez, who has been pushing digital filmmaking for several years now, “Sin City” is a personal triumph as it is the most beautiful example I have seen to date and is the first convincing argument to the superiority of digital over celluloid.
There are flesh-and-blood triumphs to be had in the film as well in the form of the surprisingly high level of performances from all of the key players. All of the actors realize that they are playing archetypes instead of regular people and respond with performances that are just heightened enough without slipping over into parody. Clive Owen is quite good as Dwight, finding a nice balance between his heroic and psychotic halves and also strikes considerable sparks with Rosario Dawson, who also contributes a memorable portrayal of a tough gal who is as deadly as she is sexy. Benicio Del Toro contributes his wildest turn since “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” with his flamboyantly freaky work as a bad guy who seems to been equally inspired by “The Bad Lieutenant” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” There are effective turns from actors who have never really done much of note before (such as Josh Hartnett and Brittany Murphy) as well as good, underused actors (such as Carla Gugino, Rutger Hauer and Powers Boothe) whose excitement at getting to sink their teeth into strong material is evident in their brief scenes. Even Jessica Alba, generally not considered the strongest actress working today, does good work here as Nancy, the good-natured angel who has somehow managed to exist in the streets of Basin City without losing her essential sweetness and innocence, even while dancing on a pole wearing assless chaps.
The two best performances, however, come from Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis, two actors whose voices and personalities seem to have been custom-designed for material such as this. For Rourke, his scary and soulful turn as Marv, who is both heartbreaking in the scenes where he recalls the one brief moment of happiness in his life and terrifying when he tracks down those who stole it from him, is the role that he has deserved for a long time–one that reminds us that he is, beyond the tabloid headlines and questionable personal choices, an uncommonly gifted actor who hasn’t lost an bit of the raw charisma that made him a star in the first place. Although Willis is never quite able to visually convince us that his character is in his late 60's, it doesn’t really matter because he has the look and the attitude of a man who has seen too much in his life–most of it hideous–and, having seen, in Nancy, one bit of good, he will go to hell and back to protect it and thereby give some meaning to his life. Not many actors working today could pull this off without seeming out-of-place, but Willis is completely believable in the part and when he performs his final act to save Nancy, he takes what could have been a simple bit of nihilistic violence and invests it with a surprising heft and power that resonates long after the lights have gone up.For Miller, who long resisted allowing his work to be sold to Hollywood after an unpleasant experience working on the “Robocop” sequels, the film is a testament to his unique vision and for Rodriguez, whose previous films (including the “El Mariachi” and “Spy Kids” franchises) have occasionally betrayed a vision fueled by wild energy and little else, “Sin City” is the high-water mark of his career and a suggestion that he can, with the proper material, deliver more than flashy bits of goofball pop cinema. Together, they have created a film that is funny, creepy, sexy, thoughtful and violent (while the latter is highly stylized, the levels of brutality are high enough to push the envelope for “R”-rated films not featuring Jesus as a central character)-a cinematic orgy for movie lovers that will leave them dazed, dazzled and ready for more. This is one of those movies where audiences sit through all of the end credits–not because they are hoping for a final bonus cookie, but because they are too overwhelmed from the entire experience to be able to even move for a few minutes afterwards.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11918&reviewer=389
originally posted: 04/01/05 14:23:40
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USA
01-Apr-2005 (R)
DVD: 13-Dec-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Jul-2005
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