PREMIERE.COM’S Sin City review
Release Date: April 1, 2005
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Michael Clarke Duncan, Michael Madsen, Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Jamie King, Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Carla Gugino, Alexis Bledel, Jessica Alba, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer Directed by: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Black and white and read all over, graphic novelist Frank Miller's prestigious and brutally violent Sin City series already acts like a storyboarded film trying to break free of its comic-book panel confinements. Not just lifting the two-fisted conventions of film noir and classic crime fiction, Miller's stark universe-on-paper patches them all together into a timeless super-noir Hydra, splashing only small spots of color (blue eyes, bubbly red blood, a yellow-skinned pedophile) to punctuate its extreme contrast in neutral hues and moral ambiguities. It's a perfectly imperfect world of hard-boiled scum who can't be stopped by bullets, Glamazonian hookers with swords and guns, and other boyish fantasies come true, where heroes don't exist and antiheroes are only made evident by the chivalry in their internal narrations. All these elements that shade Miller's brilliant pop-art pulp are here in the Sin City film, a rough-and-tumble magnum opus of digital filmmaking that thrillingly basks in the sick, slick, sexy and quick-witted excesses of its imaginatively mutant stylizations.
In a story that's so often cited that it now sounds like a publicity stunt, Austin auteur Robert Rodriguez (the Spy Kids and El Mariachi series) hounded Miller into letting him „translate“ his images and clipped dialogue to the screen verbatim, even dropping out of the Director's Guild to ensure Miller could share a co-director credit. Similar to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or the Japanese biotech curio Casshern, the filmmaking method that won over the Sin City creator placed all the actors on a green-screen backlot, with the final silvery-grayscale environments grafted on in CGI post-production. The story, a primer on Miller's urban nightmare, interweaves three of the novels' plotlines (bookended by suave assassin Josh Hartnett's short segments): „The Hard Goodbye,“ the best of the lot, charts an alpha-hulk's vengeance (Mickey Rourke, wearing Frankenstein-faced prosthetics that practically caricature his real-life, broken-boxer mug) after the prostitute love-of-his-life is murdered; „That Yellow Bastard“ stars Bruce Willis as a disgraced cop with a bum heart, who is blindly determined to save a stripper (Jessica Alba) from a lemon-colored rapist (Nick Stahl); „The Big Fat Kill“—for which triptych-king Quentin Tarantino guest-directed a scene—is a Good Samaritan (Clive Owen) vs. Bad Cop (Benicio Del Toro) war-in-the-making that climaxes in Old Town, where even the mob won't mess with the prostitutes that rule these rain-soaked streets.
Speaking of which, as all the women in Sin City are either strippers, cocktail waitresses or whores, conservative and feminist critics are probably going to condemn the film as yet another notch in the ongoing Decline of Western Civilization, but the Millerverse is hardly misogynistic. The women are all armed and empowered (seriously, you don't fuck with the ladies of Old Town)—and in case you think Sin City is misanthropic, too—the protagonists all serve righteous causes, even if they have to sever limbs and rip out testicles to prove their valor. If there's anything that's wrong with the must-see Sin City, it's that once the brain gets comfortable with the sensory overload, the Orson Welles-in-the-digital-gutter effect can seem repetitive, and audiences may start feeling too self-conscious of being strapped into a „hip and edgy“ thrill-ride.
—Aaron Hillis
*/ -->