05/06/2005

Sin City - a non comics-reader's view

entry posted by Inquisitor at 16:53 (permalink).
categories: Movies

(Frank Miller will hate me for not calling it a graphic novel, but...)

Sin City is unrelentingly grim, morally suspect at best, profoundingly depressing and, to put it somewhat plainly, screwed up. But since that's exactly what you would expect from the movie in the first place, this isn't a criticism. It's basically an interconnected anthology movie (similar in interconnections to something like Pulp Fiction) relating three only slightly different storylines from the seedy side of the tracks: one where Marv (Mickey Rourke) takes revenge on the surprisingly large conspiracy that killed his prostitute girlfriend, one where local boy Dwight (the surprisingly good Clive Owen) gets into trouble when his girlfriend's somewhat dodgy ex-lover 'Jackie Boy' (Benicio del Toro) turns out to be much more of a problem than anticipated, and one where vice cop John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is taken revenge on by a paedophile (Nick Stahl) that's too high in the political food chain.

It does have a truly impressive visual style. Robert Rodriguez has taken every effort to replicate the visual style of the "graphic novel", and succeeds remarkably. Most attempts at CG-sets look horrible, and out of place; the most obvious recent example being Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which uses the same techniques as Sin City but doesn't have a good reason for using them, and hence just feels disjointed and over-enthusiastic. For Sin City, a world told pretty much entirely in black and white, the stylisation does have a purpose and it works; you don't notice the unreality of the CG-sets since the film works because it is unreal. It is thus a remarkable triumph of style benefiting substance, where Sky Captain was style over.

Certainly, it's a grim movie, but it is benefited by a truly enormous amount of black humour; especially in the Marv section, which despite being the most nasty of the three sections (and that's some achievement, folks) also contains Marv's sardonic commentary, pumping out his somewhat single-minded philosophy in the most well-constructed of terms: e.g. before a back-alley beating, "I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad." Sin City has the ability to be funny in the most unexpected of places, and that saves the movie from being as vile as it sounds from the descriptions; it really is worth watching. So much in the movie has the opportunity to go wrong - the near-permanent CGI, the use of HDTV cameras instead of film, Clive Owen - but it doesn't, and that can only be put down to the strength of the source material and the talents of Rodriguez and Miller. Really, it's a must-see.

And Batman Begins comes out in two weeks - David Goyer's a good writer and Christopher Nolan's a good director and together, they could create a really good movie. And the trailer's decent too.

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