2005 / 124 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

If you walk down the right alley in Sin City, you can find almost anything. As long as you’re looking for violence, prostitution or degradation, that is.

Welcome to (Ba)sin City: a town where the honest cops are the exception rather than the rule, twisted psychopaths routinely prowl the streets, even the clergy is depraved and the prostitutes provide better law enforcement than the actual police. The film is based on four comic books in the “Sin City” series by Frank Miller and, really, it is four movies with one theme. What is that theme? Apparently it’s that people are pretty fucked up, overall, and capable of doing some truly hideous things to one another while hiding behind some pretty sanctimonious facades. I guess it wants you believe it’s about redemption or something but, really, it’s about the human capacity for violence and about violence as a form of entertainment. Now, don’t get me wrong. I really think that violence IS a form of entertainment. There have been a lot of movies that have made violence extremely entertaining (the “Kill Bill” movies, “Robocop”, any Schwarzenegger film from the 1980’s) and much of the violence in “Sin City” is pretty damn enjoyable. Unfortunately, and I feel really weird typing this considering how much I enjoy violence in cinema (hey, I enjoy watching a great action sequence as much as I enjoy a good musical number) the violence in this film eventually becomes redundant. A person can only see a man beat information out of so many people or maim so many brutal serial killers (and, really, how many brutal serial killers can one damn city maintain) before it starts to lose its impact.

“Sin City”, adapted almost slavishly (I suspect) from the comics written by Frank Miller by Robert Rodriguez, is a kind of uber film noir in comic book form. Even though it is technically a movie, the feeling of watching the film is the same as that of reading a comic book. It really is like a comic book come to life, perhaps more so than any other comic book movie ever made. The only danger of that approach is that the film has trouble working completely as a, well, film. Sure, it’s gorgeous to look at and it’s well acted, overall (with a couple of exceptions that I’ll get to soon enough) and the style of the film is absolutely fantastic.but it never seems to develop beyond its life as a comic book. It’s an exercise in cool and a wild experiment in digital filmmaking, but there isn’t a lot more to it than that. The movie operates on a scale that flirts with being over the top nearly every minute of its running time. As Nigel Tuffnel said in the movie “This is Spinal Tap”: “It goes to eleven”. Well, this movie plays everything at about eleven. It’s big, wild, daring stuff played to the absolute limit, walking a precarious tightrope that threatens to spill over into self parody at any given moment. The only problem is, sometimes it goes OVER the limit. Instead of wincing at the bloodshed, I was often laughing giddily with it. The dialogue was sometimes ridiculously hard-boiled (so stylized that even Bogart would have blushed saying most of these lines) and the line deliveries (particularly by Michael Clarke Duncan and Benicio Del Toro) are sometimes entirely too gruff. The style is occasionally too bold for its own damn good. There is one moment where a character should be very, very dead and he is, but he is talking to another character in the character’s mind all the same. This moment might have worked, but the way it was handled here.I just found it annoying. And, as I said before, there is only so much violence and depravity that can take place in one town before the film lapses into sheer silliness. More often than not, the film works ingeniously. But once in a while, it just gets silly. And when the actors and filmmakers are working this hard to make something this tough, that can get almost deadly. People in this movie are in physical and emotional pain. They are often fighting for their very lives. It would be a little better if the movie made us feel more about it, beyond feeling that what we’re seeing is pretty cool. Cool is good. Cool is fine. But, when you’ve got people being torn apart piece by piece, cool might not be enough.

Yet, for all the nitpicking, I was entertained by the majority of “Sin City”. It’s sometimes obnoxious at times, but for the most part it’s a rollicking ride. Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke do excellent work in this film, some of the best either man has ever done. And Clive Owen expands on the greatness he showed in last year’s “Closer”. The story involving Mickey Rourke’s character, Marv, is easily the most compelling in the film, and it’s also the one that most seems to have a point. Clive’s is something of a meandering enterprise that, while fun, contains more obnoxious moments than any of the others and, more than any of the others, overstays its welcome.

The look of the film is amazing, especially for a movie shot entirely against a green screen. Unlike last year’s “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, the actors actually interact with their environments and seem to actually be a part of the world around them. The visuals pop and the music is a perfect compliment to them. If they had tightened the film up a little and maybe worked a little more on enhancing and expanding the world of the comics into something approaching a form of reality, this would have been an amazing film. As is, it’s pretty good, not great. It lacks the assured control of the “Kill Bill” movies, as well as the sense of heart and humanity that elevated those films to a higher level. But, then again, it IS a movie based on a comic book. Comic books don’t usually catalogue reality; instead they deal with a stylized, mythologized form of the world we encounter every day. And, as an adaptation of that, this film works quite well. But the beatings and bloodshed would still be better if they seemed to escalate, to build toward something as they go. Even on the exaggerated level this film operates on, it’s a bit too much.

But this is still a good flick and, for the most part, an eye-popping and damned entertaining one. It’s got its flaws, for certain, but it’s still the most fun I’ve had at the theater in quite a while and that has to count for something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.