hollywood reporter (negativ review)
„Sin City“ is film noir amped like nobody's business. Imagine the perverse fiction of Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich crossed with S&M/fetish art and the exaggerated bravado and punchy prose of „Pulp Fiction“ and you're halfway there. Lifted almost intact from the graphic novels of Frank Miller, the movie is a directorial collaboration between Miller and innovative filmmaking maverick Robert Rodriguez. The comic book's style and substance get transferred directly to the screen through the digital cinematography and greenscreen technique Rodriguez pioneered in his „Spy Kids“ series, right down to the silhouetted, black-and-white cityscape, absurd caricatures and stylized violence.
The movie depicts what pulp fiction writers only imply and suggest. You're trapped in a world of venality, unbridled lust and depravity. Everything here – bondage, torture, castration, dismemberment, cannibalism – is a big joke. And authority figures, be it cop, clergy or government official, are debased and decadent. It's a movie designed to appeal almost exclusively to young males, say 13 to 30. The relentless carnage, cartoonish as it is, might put off women, who in the movie are either victims or, conversely, psycho-killer sluts. However, „Sin City“ is not so much misogynistic as misanthropic. Boxoffice should be substantial, but there's not enough here to approach „Pulp Fiction“ or „Kill Bill“ numbers.
The major problem is that after about 10 minutes, you've seen all the movie's tricks. The look is hypnotic yet never changes. Repetition is the order of the day. And the cartoon savagery grows tiresome. Where films by Quentin Tarantino – who reportedly was paid a dollar to oversee one sequence here as a „special guest director“ – attain, arguably, the status of cinematic literature, „Sin City“ remains mired in pulp. Certainly, pessimism, even nihilism, runs throughout literature and cinema. But here the attitude feels inauthentic, more a pose of ersatz hipness than sincere conviction.
Rodriguez cherry-picks from three „Sin City“ stories plus an opening scene between Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton that sets the film's tone and tenor. The stories are told in order, but there is slight interplay among the three.
On his last day on the job, embattled John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), the last honest cop in Basin City, must battle a bum ticker and his corrupt partner (Michael Madsen) to rescue 11-year-old Nancy (Makenzie Vega) from the clutches of the sadistic son (Nick Stahl) of a senator. In a passage that takes place eight years later, Nancy morphs into a curvaceous Jessica Alba.
A Beauty and the Beast yarn has mountainous and hairy ex-con Marv (Mickey Rourke buried in prosthetics) take home a goddess named Goldie (Jaime King). She is murdered while he sleeps. Marv vows revenge, rampaging through the entire police force, gangsters and tough-as-nails hookers to get at the perp.
Finally, there is Dwight (Clive Owen), a rough-at-the-edges PI who gets mixed up in the murder of a predatory cop (Benicio Del Toro). This threatens to shatter the truce between Basin City police and prostitutes headed by tough-girl Gail (Rosario Dawson), who take care of business in Old Town.
Outfitted in extreme makeup, prosthetics and scars, actors stride through this adult fantasyland with mock belligerence. Many of Hollywood's top young talent turn up – Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Devon Aoki, Carla Gugino, Alexis Bledel. Women are nearly all babes with breasts either exposed or popping out of bodices while derrieres peek through fishnet stockings and garters. Guys dress in leather, T-shirts and trench coats to slip down dark streets and alleys.
The drawings that make up the production design are of a forbidding metropolis, mostly in black and white so that blood spurts from bodies like milk from a cow. Color highlights key objects – a bright red lipstick and dress or locks of shiny gold. Dialogue is purple: „She smells like an angel ought to smell“ or „I ain't playing hard to get – I'm impossible to get!“
„Sin City“ is eye-popping yet ultimately thin and shallow as a page in a graphic novel. It's a fiction built on fiction and fantasy based on sexual kinks. The appeal is visceral yet condescending. It's mere exploitation designed to look hip and cutting-edge. Every character is essentially the same, and the stories are interchangeable. The film's mantra – „Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything“ – rings false. You always find the same damn thing.
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