REVIEW: Sin City (2005)

Hardboiled tales of sex, murder and corruption in Sin City revolve around the intersecting lives of several residents, including a cop (Bruce Willis) who sacrifices himself to protect a young girl (Jessica Alba) and an unstable bruiser (Mickey Rourke) who turns the city upside down to find the one who killed his lover.

With Sin City, comic-to-movie adaptations finally grow up. Robert Rodriguez, helmer of the family-friendly Spy Kids films and the violent El Mariachi trilogy, co-directs with Frank Miller this faithful screen adaptation of Miller’s Sin City comics. Shot with digital cameras, this ultra-stylized noir boosts completely artificial backgrounds, often stark black and white imaging occasionally mixed with bits of color, and plenty of gratuitous nudity and extreme violence.

On top of that, it’s shot completely over-the-top. Mickey Rourke sports an artificial jaw to match his character’s extreme look. 1930s-era cars literally bounce over roads as they race through the city. Characters get shot repeatedly, run over, hit with a sledge hammer, have body parts cut off or shot off, and yet they generally keep on ticking long after any real human would have succumbed to pain or worse. Action scenes include having Rourke as the hard-nosed Marv crash through a police car windshield, Elijah Wood as the cannibal killer Kevin leaping around and kung fu-kicking Marv like a piñata and a bevy of machine gun-totting hookers led by Rosario Dawson blasting an alley-full of men from rooftops. It’s completely ridiculous, and yet it all works magnificently. Miller and Rodriguez manage to make it work by essentially creating a moving comic book and this look and feel remains consistent throughout the movie.

The all-star casting is near genius as just about everyone fills out their character perfectly. Leading the pack is Mickey Rourke as Marv, the meanest and nastiest badass to hit the screen in a long time. He brings what could have been a very two-dimensional role to life and even keeps his head above the special effects and manic direction that would have drowned out lesser actors. He also hits just the right comic tone in scenes where he’s popping pills, questioning his sanity or finishing off the killer he spends most of his time hunting down.

As Hartigan, the aging cop with a bum ticker who tries to save young Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) from a fate worse than death, Bruce Willis is in familiar territory. I was beginning to wonder where his soiled tank top from the Die Hard franchise was. He has a strange relationship with Alba, who grows up to become an exotic dancer. Although years apart in age, she falls in love with him early on. Unlike her character in the comic, Alba keeps her clothes on, which may be disappointing to fan boys, but doesn’t diminish her sex appeal. Besides, there is plenty of skin to be found elsewhere in this movie.

Nick Stahl plays the notorious child rapist and son of the governor who becomes the Yellow Bastard. On more than one occasion he sets his sights on Nancy and it’s up to Hartigan to stop him. It’s a twisted role that’s well played and emphasized by the bright yellow color he appears in against the gray-shaded backgrounds. Suffice to say, he gets what he deserves in some of the film’s more gruesome scenes.

Yet nothing is more gruesome or bizarre than Kevin. Elijah Wood is perfectly cast as a geeky-looking and mute cannibal killer who keeps his victims’ heads mounted on a wall. One of the film’s great scenes is when Marv decides to take him on with the assistance of a few hardware items. For whatever reason, Kevin is a spry kung fu practitioner with claws and a positively creepy and emotionless stare. It’s sick and twisted, yet admittedly satisfying to see how Marv deals with this freak.

There is a third story that involves Clive Owen as Dwight, who joins peacekeeping hookers in Old Town to take on a nasty womanizer named Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) and a gang intent on moving in on the girls’ territory. We get some more martial arts action here in the shape of a petite Asian lass named Miho (Devon Aoki) who turns out to be quite deadly with a samurai sword and shuriken. Heads roll, hands fly off and chests are perforated in style. As a close associate of Quentin Tarantino, it’s clear that Rodriguez was intent on getting into some Kill Bill action. Although this is more of a crime noir movie, he still gets his chance to shoot some martial arts action between Kevin and Miho.

There are quite a few fight scenes and most of them very well done. The things I usually complain about in modern movies, such as frequent cuts and obscured movement, are resolved by clarity in direction. While no one looks like Jet Li, even on a bad day, Rodriguez keeps character intent and the immediate effects of action clear. It also helps that the fight scenes are shot to match the look and editing of the rest of the movie. The capper is bone-crunching foley work to give each punch that added oomph. The emphasis is not on pretty fights, but quick and violent destruction and Rodriguez succeeds very well in that regard.

The movie is nicely bookmarked by the one actor I feared could do the most damage, Josh Hartnett. It turns out that he does nothing to ruin his scenes. Not so surprisingly, Benicio Del Toro is fantastic as a womanizer. He ends up sharing a very interesting scene with Clive Owen in a car. If I were to complain about anyone’s performance it would be a toss up between Brittany Murphy, who plays Del Toro’s abused girlfriend and Michael Madsen, who plays Willis’ partner. Everyone is playing a little over-the-top, but these two seem to have the least control over their own performances. Madsen sounds like he’s reading the script for the first time and Murphy just overdoes it.

After Once Upon a Time in Mexico, I feared the worse for Robert Rodriguez as an action moviemaker. That movie, which topped off his El Mariachi franchise, was sloppily edited, lacking in narrative focus and possessing unconvincing action scenes. Its one saving grace was Johnny Depp who stole the show. Yet Sin City shows that with a clear vision, Rodriguez is not only capable of still delivering a satisfying action and exploitation flick, but of also advancing the art of digital moviemaking. Up till now, the best that digital moviemaking had to offer was Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, two movies that despite any strengths were lacking in a distinctive visual style to give their scenes genuine depth and mood. While perhaps not as flavorful as noir classics of yor, Sin City does offer a very distinctive visual and visceral style that effectively captures the vision that Frank Miller brought to comic book pages. In doing so, Miller and Rodriguez, like Tarantino, have put ballsy uninhibited fun back into genre movies.