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Sin
City
Best
Price $9.52
-- Buy it now!
Brutal and breathtaking,
Sin City is Robert
Rodriguez's
stunningly realized vision of Frank
Miller's
pulpy comic books. In the first of three
separate but loosely related stories,
Marv (Mickey
Rourke
in heavy makeup) tries to track down
the killers of a woman who ended up
dead in his bed.
In the second story, Dwight's
(Clive
Owen)
attempt to defend a woman from a brutal
abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens
to destroy the uneasy truce among the
police, the mob, and the women of Old
Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last
day on the job (Bruce
Willis)
rescues a young girl from a kidnapper,
but is himself thrown in jail. Years
later, he has a chance to save her again.
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Based on three of Miller's
immensely popular and immensely gritty
books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat
Kill, and That Yellow Bastard), Sin
City is unquestionably the most faithful
comic-book-based movie ever made. Each
shot looks like a panel from its source
material, and director Rodriguez (who
refers to it as a "translation"
rather than an adaptation) resigned
from the Directors Guild so that Miller
could share a directing credit. Like
the books, it's almost entirely in stark
black and white with some occasional
bursts of color (a woman's red lips,
a villain's yellow face). The backgrounds
are entirely digitally generated, yet
not self-consciously so, and perfectly
capture Miller's gritty cityscape. And
though most of Miller's copious nudity
is absent, the violence is unrelentingly
present. That may be the biggest obstacle
to viewers who aren't already fans of
the books and who may have been turned
off by Kill Bill (whose director, Quentin
Tarantino,
helmed one scene of Sin City). In addition,
it's a bleak, desperate world in which
the heroes are killers, corruption rules,
and the women are almost all prostitutes
or strippers. But Miller's stories are
riveting, and the huge cast--which also
includes Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Brittany
Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del
Toro, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Michael
Clarke Duncan, Devin Aoki, Carla Gugino,
and Josh Hartnett--is just about perfect.
(Only Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen,
while very well-suited to their roles,
seem hard to separate from their established
screen personas.) In what Rodriguez
hopes is the first of a series, Sin
City is a spectacular achievement.
-- David Horiuchi
*Visit Amazon.com
for current prices.
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