Sin City is a high contrast tour de force cinematic adaptation of Frank Miller’s hugely popular and wickedly grotesque graphic novel homage to the hard-boiled style of Dashell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. Robert Rodriquez (The Faculty) teams up with Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino to direct a movie that resonates with Tarantino’s awe-inspiring Kill Bill movies.
Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Madsen, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Rutger Hauer, Rosario Dawson and Jessica Alba are just some of the dream cast members playing unpredictable characters that will take your breath away. Filmed with state-of-the-art special effects Sin City is a lush stylized dark and gritty film that weaves together three Frank Miller stories (The Big Fat Kill, The Hard Goodbye and That Yellow Bastard) with eye-popping results that threaten to addict audiences to the movie for repeated viewing.
The pitch-dark shadows that splay across every B&W image in Sin City evince a wellspring of emotional depth and cruel intention that’s expressed with markedly non-intrusive voice-over narration by the protagonists of each story. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is an uncompromising honest cop who does eight years of hard time for a crime he didn’t commit in order to protect a little girl named Nancy after she’s kidnapped by the serial rapist son (Nick Stahl) of the town’s corrupt Senator (Powers Boothe). Michael Madsen comes up short by giving stilted line readings as Hartigan’s corrupt cop partner Bob, and his performance stands out like a sore thumb in a movie where every other actor delivers Miller’s cynical dialogue with pitch-perfect precision.
Mickey Rourke steals the movie as Marv, a virtually indestructible hulk of a bastard addicted to violence, booze and pills. “Marv was born in the wrong century,” the movie tells us. “He belongs on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody’s face.”
Marv’s taste for blood is piqued after the murder of a hooker named Goldie (Jamie King) who showed him one “night of kindness.” Marv sets off on an ass-kicking investigation that finds him doing things like dragging a man facedown on the street by one hand as he speeds along in his car with the door open.
Once Marv locates his serial killer prey Kevin-one very tweaky Elijah Wood-it’s all about amputation and decapitation. As all action movie fans know, a film’s entertainment value goes up eminently whenever there’s a decapitation involved.
Clive Owen rounds out the pulpy noir fun as Dwight an all around bad ass who gets caught in an apocalyptic battle between the cops and the mob as the result of a mistaken cop murder performed by the gun-and-sword wielding prostitutes of Old Town.
“You’ve got to prove to your friends you’re worth a damn. Sometimes it means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lotta people” is the way Dwight explains his philosophy.
Where last year’s Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow rendered flaccid results with its overstated use of green screen CGI technology, Sin City uses eye-catching reverse-out negative imagery and significant splashes of color to emphasize character traits and show action exactly as Miller originally drew them in his novels.
Black and white characters bleed bright white blood from black bullet wounds. The effect facilitates the Miller’s sinewy noir-inflected language that continually hits you like blast of cold, smoky air.
Guillermo Del Toro has said the key to a great comic book movie is that its creators “do it out of passion.” There’s a lot of that precious stuff in every frame of Sin City. It’s like a fantasy nightmare where real living people morph into super-action visions of beguiling elegant brutality. MTW
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