Sin City
Dimension Films
Starring: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro
The Verdict: Comic book characters come to life in this guilty pleasure.
Movie: 3 1/2 stars out of 4 stars
Basin City is a hard place to make a life, an even harder place to make an honest one. Called simply Sin City by many of its jaded denizens, this is a dark, town full of bloodthirsty hookers, killers on the lam, slinky barmaids, dirty cops and dirtier priests.
Topless skyscrapers reach into murky skies. Cigarette smoke clouds every seedy room. Boulevards drip with fresh sweat and old sin. Cop cars zoom over the city’s steep hills and zigzag recklessly through its empty interchanges, but crime rules these steamy streets. As one seen-it-all palooka puts it, “Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything.”
Heroes are hard to find in a place like Sin City, but three fallen men are trying their best to find what little redemption they can. Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a veteran cop with a heart problem, is determined to save a little girl from the clutches of a perverted kidnapper. Dwight (Clive Owen), a murderer on the run, risks capture to stop a liquored-up lunatic (Benicio Del Toro) from taking out his aggression on innocent bystanders. And Marv (Mickey Rourke), a brutish ex-con, is out to avenge the murder of a beautiful prostitute named Goldie, a “goddess” who gave the lonely mug the best night of his life.
Frank Miller originated Basin City and its cast of characters in a series of famous graphic novels, and now Miller’s creation has been adapted for the screen by writer/director Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”). The pair’s sinisterly playful sensibilities make for a fine merger, and the resulting film unspools like pure id released and on steroids, a raging, rocking all-style noir adventure with blood and testosterone to spare.
“Sin City” plays as a comic book brought meticulously to life. Rodriguez matches Miller’s color palette exactly. Everything is shot in old-fashioned black and white with only occasional flashes of color, like a femme fatale’s cool blue eyes or the orange of a pill bottle or the sickly gold skin of a creepy villain called the Yellow Bastard. The star color in “Sin City,” though, is red, which is reserved for one stunning dress, a souped-up Corvette, several smatterings of lipstick and, of course, gallon upon gallon of blood.
Different rules apply in the comics universe. For instance, superhuman feats are possible. One character can be shot, run over and electrocuted and still come back for more. The same character can rip out prison cell bars and smash a villain’s face deep into a brick wall. Blood can explode from wounds and be white when it needs to remain visible against a black background.
Narrative left turns can happen at any moment, whether it means Dwight gets embroiled in a turf war between hookers and the mob or Hartigan runs afoul of the Yellow Bastard or Marv ends up at a farm on the outskirts of town where “people die the wrong way” and a grinning cannibal lurks just behind the next tree.
“Sin City” has a funky life force all its own and stuns as it gets detail after detail painstakingly right. Rodriguez lovingly captures all the minutiae of Miller’s often breathtaking compositions, from the lush backgrounds to the wind-whipped tip of Hartigan’s necktie. Every shot is a painting, and every shot tells a story.
The level of violence in “Sin City” is both invigorating and disturbing. At times the killings purposefully cross the line from popcorn fun to outright sadism as such repulsive topics as pedophilia and castration get kicked into play, and the film’s relentless cavalcade of shootings, mutilations and decapitations become harder to stomach after a while.
It may also upset many viewers that women fill deliberately secondary roles in Miller’s world, subjugated to service as hookers, exotic dancers and other objects of desire. Carla Gugino breaks the trend by playing a parole officer, but the actress is so exploitatively nude for most of her screen time that her character’s respectable occupation is nullified.
But that’s just the way “Sin City” is, love it or leave it. The film walks the same fine line as its conflicted protagonists, skirting all the edges of the moral realm between temptation and resistance, good and evil. As the film convincingly argues, right and wrong can only be painted in shades of murky gray.
A roster of A-list talent gives “Sin City” its pulse. Willis is great as an upright man beaten down by time and the futility of being a good cop in a lawless city. Owen’s character isn’t very well-defined, but the actor’s got screen presence to burn and owns his all-action scenes with gritted teeth and guns blazing. Del Toro is amusingly unhinged as one of his patented wild-eyed nutjobs and Jessica Alba adds welcome sweetness as the nicest girl in town.
But it’s Mickey Rourke who steals the show. Buried under muscle padding, a crew cut and a massive prosthetic chin, Rourke is unrecognizable yet instantly engaging as Marv, the haunted bruiser readying for war.
“Sin City” isn’t perfect. It’s a little too long, and it juggles so many paces and tones that it can’t always keep them in check. Rodriguez tends to let scenes play out past their peak, wallowing a few beats too long on plot twists and gross-outs. Moreover, Rodriguez’s film can’t quite break free of its roots -literary or cinematic.
The legacy of Quentin Tarantino looms oppressively over “Sin City,” from its time-jumping chronology and three-story framework (a la “Pulp Fiction”) to the fact that Tarantino “guest directs” a scene in the new film. Miller, too, seems to get more of a voice in the proceedings than Rodriguez (the two men share the movie’s directing credit, a tribute to Miller that lost Rodriguez his membership in the Directors Guild of America). Rodriguez is so reverent of his source material and adheres so strenuously to it that his film almost fails to find its own voice within the language of cinema.
That being said, “Sin City” comes close to cool perfection, and as an impressive technical achievement and as a triumph of sheer style over substance, this is the year’s first must-see film.