SIN CITY (2005)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Based on Frank Miller's cult graphic novel, Sin City is actually Basin City, a place where primarily murderers, prostitutes, mobsters, crooked politicians and the police, who seem just as crooked, exist. There is one good cop in this wretched mix of scum and villainy, and his name is Hartigan (Bruce Willis). He is a near-60-year-old crusty man with ambition to solve one last crime involving a little girl who has been molested by a truly evil serial pedophile (Nick Stahl). But then it seems that Hartigan's partner (Michael Madsen) is not such a nice guy either since both are after the same nutcase. I should also mention that Jessica Alba is introduced as a stripper with a heart of gold who works at a sleazy bar where all the characters occasionally pop up.
One such character is a murderous hulk who defies the laws of gravity named Marv (Mickey Rourke). He has a night of bliss with a prostitute named Goldie (Jamie King), who is afterwards murdered. Of course, Marv is the suspect and he spends the rest of the movie killing every person in his path, including scores of policemen and hit men, trying to find the truth. He also has a confrontation with a mute cannibal with piercing fingernails (Elijah Wood) who moves too fast for anyone. And let's not forget a naked Carla Gugino as Marv's parole officer!
Then there is a prototypically weird story involving Clive Owen as some wanted man who has a prostitute for a girlfriend (Rosario Dawson). Owen is also protecting most of the city's prostitutes from a vicious cop named Jack Rafferty (Benicio Del Toro), and an extended scene in a car in which Toro is in some sort of disembodied state will be discussed in great detail by future avaricious film students (this one sequence is directed by Quentin Tarantino).
"Sin City" has grit and has pure style in great strokes - this is a painterly vision of noir where everyone talks as if they were in a 1940's detective yarn (the voice-over narration certainly amplifies that). Of course, the new additions to the mix are seeing isolated color patterns in a black-and-white world. We see a woman in the first scene wearing a red gown while the rest of her is in black-and-white. Sometimes eyes are illuminated by color, especially green or blue. Sometimes blood is crimson red, and other times it is white or a custard yellow (depending on the character). In terms of visual imagination and the use of rear-screen projection, "Sin City" is not just a comic-book yarn come to life - it is noir as reimagined in all its luster by a film noir addict.
Unfortunately, the characters can't bear such close scrutiny. Marv's story is easily the best and Mickey Rourke steals the movie with his persona and his manner of provoking his enemies ("Can't you do any better than that?") His story is that he wants to know who framed him and who killed his beloved Goldie, whom he didn't know was a prostitute. The story has purpose but no real drive - all Marv does is kill and kill and we lose focus as to whom he's after.
Same with Hartigan, the crusty cop who gets plugged throughout the movie without ever going down. Willis does the best he can with a one-dimensional character but there is nothing to chew on - he is shot and left for dead only to come back for more. His character is trying to find the little girl he saved from the pedophile. His quest takes him about eight years since he's been wrongly jailed for the crime. He finds her and the pedophile, who is now a snarling, ugly creature known as Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl), the deformed freak armed with a whip who gets an orgasm when a woman screams. Though this story ends with a touching coda, it lacks any real weight.
Director Robert Rodriguez invests this mish-mash with real style but what he has not done is inject the same life into the characters, all of whom are as arbitrary and dull as one can imagine. There is not one character that you feel any real connection with - they exist as pawns in a world of sin and vice. Rodriguez and comic-book creator Frank Miller assume that this central conceit is enough to carry a movie but it isn't. And the narrative style, which feels slightly borrowed from Tarantino's classic goofy crime caper "Pulp Fiction," does little to enhance any of the characters' attributes. Shallowness is the name of the game. People get brutally beaten to a pulp from one scene to the next. Bullets fly everywhere and do little to decimate the main characters, though the supporting players get offed immediately. And there are more fistfights, decapitations, beatings, and so on (at one point, a skinhead gets an arrow pierced through his heart and he just stands around waiting for someone to call a medic). It becomes so repetitive because there is no sense of urgency - it is like watching a cartoon where people jump from great heights and land on their two feet with nary a scratch or a broken bone.
"Sin City" is too long-winded yet it is also too visually arresting to dismiss entirely. It has the style of the genre but not the soul, not the humanism and certainly has no interest in the complex morality of an existential universe. As I've said before, audiences today could care less about such weighty matters - they just want action. Perhaps fans of the comic book will get what they pay for. But even such tough noir pictures like "Chinatown" or "Detour" or "The Big Heat," or even the devil-may-care thriller "Angel Heart," required some emotional investment. Here, the only investment is in seeing how highly-charged Rodriguez's giddy filmic mind can get. Count me out.
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