Review of Sin City (2005) by Ethan P — 11 Feb 2016

If any film has ever brought a comic book to life and envisioned such a stark, nightmarish world, it is Sin City. It deserves all the acclaim it gets for its incredible mood and aesthetic style. It is a soulless, explosive noir and looks like a graphic novel would, with its exaggerated action, creative visuals and stark silhouettes. It's also thrilling to watch, with its bombastic and brutal violence. The dialogue is choppy and a little unnatural, but that sort of adds to the whole unnerving feeling of the film. Besides the choice of making the villain a yellow goblin, I really can't critique Sin City stylistically in any way. It is brilliant and sort of amazing to watch the creative ways they captured the essence of the comics.

What I can critique are the troubling themes and general likability of the movie. Sin City has a distinct lack of fun and it's relentlessly gruesome and depressing. It's a world filled with murderers, prostitutes, child rapists and cannibalism. There is no escape from the world of creeps, scumbags and psychopaths or the decapitated heads and limbs being chopped off. Scene after scene of this grotesque world is hard to stomach and even harder to enjoy. The film also treats women like shit. They are all one dimensional characters, whose only role in the film is to be ogled at or have sex. Goldie is only held in esteem because she's the only woman that would have sex with Mickey Rourke and she needed protection. The prostitutes are powerful, but their only power is sex or guns. The other women are raped and murdered and abused by the men. None of them actually do anything important except create problems for the men to fix. And that's very troubling.

There's also a lack of compelling characters. Bruce Willis actually did a really good job in his role, as an aging cop with his heart in the right place. The one guy trying to do the right thing is the only one getting punished. Mickey Rourke's character was pretty interesting too, but very theatrical. The others were thin and unrelatable for the most part. They didn't seem human and it made it hard to connect emotionally with the movie, especially because so many of them are deranged. The narrative is interesting because it unravels in 3 or 4 parts (The Clive Owen section being my least favorite). I didn't particularly enjoy Sin City because it was a little too theatrical and relentlessly brutal, but I can completely understand why people enjoy it. It's a spectacularly stylish film if you enjoy the dark themes and violence.