Sin City
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, with “Guest Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, and plenty of others.
Rated: R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue
Parental Notes: The only reason this film is rated R and not NC-17 is because the comic-book style presentation makes the extreme violence and sexuality a bit more palatable. This is not a film for children, or for most adults either, come to that. This makes “Kill Bill” seem cartoonish. Comics are not necessarily children’s material, and “Sin City” is the poster child for comics that are potentially damaging to children.
“Sin City” is the kind of film that film critics go wild over. It was made for over the top things to be written about it, whether one loves it or hates it. It’s a comic book brought to life, with dialog straight out of a an old Bogart movie and color splashed across the screen in a way that would be minimalist if there were anything minimal about the film. This is not a movie for everyone. It is violent, gruesome, visceral, and astonishing. The sheer visual artistry in it is as breathtaking as the audacity of its makers.
The story is a mixture of three of co-director Frank Miller’s”Sin City” graphic novels (the first, third, and fourth), with one split in half to bookend the film. There are too many characters to mention in any kid of detail. Suffice it to say that the heroes (or rather, antiheroes) of the film include Marv (Nick Nolte), a heavy-hitting guy who sets out to avenge a prostitute because she’s the only woman who has ever shown him affection and desire; Dwight (Clive Owen), a killer with “a new face” who has come back to Old Town, where the prostitutes use money and weapons to keep out both the cops and the mob; and Hartigan (Bruce Willis), an aging cop who finds that saving an 11-year-old girl from a depraved serial killer is a complicated business when he’s the son of a senator. Supporting characters include Kevin (Elijah Wood), a young man whose lethal habits are matched only by his predatory skills, Gail (Rosario Dawson), the Amazonian quasi-leader of Old Town’s hookers, and Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro), an unpleasant fellow who has a nasty little secret.
The overwrought storyline is almost impossible to discuss succinctly. There’s plenty of what our old friend Alex de Large would call “the old ultra-violence,” and Sin City is a place where if good wins out, it is only at an incredibly high price. The men are violent, the women are beautiful and frequently naked, and everyone talks as though they grew up watching nothing but grade B noir movies. The characters are painted in broad strokes of moonlit clothing or blood, and superhuman feats of both self-sacrifice and depravity are commonplace.
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez have literally transformed the comics into a film. Most of the shots are straight out of the graphic novels, right down to the black-and-white photography. The only color is the red of a woman’s lips, the green of her eyes, the yellow of a drug-addled monster’s sallow skin. Blood is sometimes red and sometimes ghostly white, but always splashed in abundance. The film was shot entirely in front of a green screen, with computer wizardry filling in the backdrops and manipulating the shots so that they look like a comic panel come to life. Even if the storytelling wasn’t so visceral, the images on the screen alone would grab you by the throat and drag you through to the end of the film.
This is a film for people who love old noir thrillers and Tarantino movies. This is Sam Spade starring in “Kill Bill” — all femme fatales, good little girls, and men who either live by antiquated codes of honor or have no honor at all. The violence is extreme, and the fact that it is artistically presented only lessens its impact slightly. This is not a realistic-looking film in the slightest, but the bloodshed is visceral, gut-wrenching, and beautiful in a macabre way. “Sin City” is even more over the top than “Kill Bill” was in that respect. There are plenty of shootings, explosions, and decapitations, which are becoming fairly standard; but there is also a horrifying child rapist (who is no less distressing because we never actually see him doing it on screen) and a sequence in which a man is castrated and his head pounded to pulp by an enraged and barehanded assailant. That’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Those who can handle the violence (or are jaded by the quasi-realistic and inartistic gore pumped out by Hollywood’s slasher movies) will be all right, but the faint of heart and the young should stay away. This is a visceral thrill-ride and a very dark collection of fables; it is not for children or for most adults, either.