Review of Sin City (2005) by Darik H — 23 Aug 2014

Let the buyer beware. When Frank Miller first wrote Sin City, the miniseries that would later be renamed "The Hard Goodbye" the same way Star Wars was renamed "A New Hope" when the sequels came around, he conceived of it as the "anti-movie"- a tale so full of ultra-violence, sex, and profanity that it could never pass muster with a major production studio.

He did this primarily because of his bitter experiences with the RoboCop franchise (he wrote scripts for parts two and three that were butchered due to their excessively graphic natures), and he was determined that this was a project that he would never let Hollywood get its hands on.

Irony of ironies, Sin City is now the only Frank Miller-based movie that's worth a damn- excluding Batman Begins, which is only partially based on his work anyway- and it's all because one Hollywood filmmaker came knocking that didn't want to change a thing.

Sin City is so fundamentally Robert Rodriguez that, despite the obvious Miller influence on both the visual aesthetic and the direction, I consider this the epitome of Rodriguez's creative work. Taking three major storylines (and a short story) from the Sin City graphic novels and crunching them down into a single movie (with three storyarcs), Robert Rodriguez does for comics what the Lord of the Rings trilogy did for fiction novels- he creates the closest possible adaption of a work from a different medium while simultaneously crafting a unique and entertaining movie in its own right.

Finally using green-screen tech for a film NOT dedicated to pleasing his children, Sin City is about as controlled as a film can be, literally painting the frames around the actors in an attempt to perfectly replicate the comic panels of its source material.

This does tend to remove any feeling of natural flow from a number of scenes (as comics tend to allow readers to fill in the gaps between panels, something film cannot do as well), but this just reinforces the feeling of this being a work of art, rather than a recording of life.

I had never seen Mickey Roarke in any film before I saw this one, which made his Marv that much stronger in the viewing- but even knowing who's underneath all that make-up, he is completely concealed and transformed by it anyway (so much so that I was shocked to see what Mickey Roarke really looked like later on), and it is completely believable- at least, in context of the film.

Everyone seems to be having a lot of fun with the material, which is both noir and comic-bookish; the dialogue is far from plausible ("Dwight, you fool... You damn fool..."), but the actors pull it off, more or less (the less said about Michael Madsen, the better).

Everything in this movie is pumped up to extremes, from the angles and the shadows to the violence and the sexual content. And that is my sole caveat about this film- it is DEFINITELY not for everyone; just as Frank Miller intended, it deals with some pretty dark subject matter, and is unflinching in most of its portrayal of the seedier side of life (save the fact that Nancy wears more clothes while on-stage than in the graphic novels).

If you're averse to dark, taboo, or extremely violent material, I'd stay away from this one. However, if you've got the stomach for it (or you can laugh at the almost cartoonish treatment of a lot of it), Sin City is a singular viewing experience, the closest thing to a comic book that the silver screen can accomplish and a declaration of creative intent by two gifted individuals from two very different fields.

Just be aware of what you're getting yourself into...