Sin City | MovieZeal

By Luke Harrington

United States, 2005
Directed By: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino
Written By: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Starring: Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Powers Boothe, Clive Owen, Jaime King
Running Time: 126 minutes
Rated R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue

(out of 5 stars)

This may seem slightly odd, but it was impossible for me to watch Sin City without thinking about BBC’s six-hour adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I know—it’s a bit of a leap from gang warfare and cannibalism to Victorian-era courtship (well—actually, now that I think about it, maybe not), but despite the obvious thematic difference, the adaptations are roughly the same, as far as I’m concerned.

If you’ve seen Pride and Prejudice—and, odds are, if you or someone you know is female, you have—you know it serves one purpose and one purpose only: to be a word-for-word screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In that respect, it’s successful, but a cynic such as myself can’t watch it without thinking, what’s the point? Viewers who want to experience Austen’s novel should simply be reading Austen’s novel, and filmmakers shouldn’t be wasting their time and energy reinventing the wheel. There’s also a degree of condescension inherent here—as though Austen’s novel wasn’t “complete” or “official” until it became a film (after all, the film adds nothing except the fact that, well, it’s a film).

But maybe that’s just me. Frank Miller, the comic book artist behind the Sin City graphic novels, was directly involved in the film version, as co-director—so evidently, he believed in the project. Reportedly he had refused to even allow his novels to be adapted into films (after seeing Hollywood mangle the scripts he had penned for RoboCop 2 and 3) until he was assured that the adaptation would be completely faithful. And that’s what you have with Sin City: a shot-by-shot, line-by-line, remake of the graphic novels on which it was based. It’s never entirely clear why anyone felt the need to do this, other than possibly to save themselves the work of drawing up a storyboard. (I’ve heard the Pride and Prejudice adaptation justified on the grounds that people are simply too lazy to read books, but are people really too lazy to read comic books?)

But here it is, take it or leave it. The film unfolds as something of an anthology, with three main story arcs that sort of interweave but mostly don’t. Bruce Willis is an aging cop who is obsessed with protecting an 11-year-old who grows up to be a stripper (Jessica Alba), Clive Owen is a photographer trying to protect a district run by whores from organized crime (Alexis Bledel shows up to play a character that is essentially Rory Gilmore in fishnets), and Mickey Rourke is a generic thug looking for the killer of a prostitute (Jaime King). It all takes place within the fictional municipality of Basin “Sin” City, Washington, where the law is corrupt, and the individual finds his own justice through the barrel of a gun.

It’s all pulled off well enough, but this sort of thing has been done better before. Any film that does everything it can to evoke the mood of a film noir and then hands you a silly story about a cannibalistic cartel—with a straight face—clearly needs work. It’s also just too nihilistic for its own good. The fact that all of the characters are too corrupt to like (with the possible exception of the Willis character) doesn’t exactly help to absorb the viewer. If any of these stories had been made into a feature-length production, we might have come to sympathize with one of the characters eventually, but the episodes end too quickly to allow the viewer to get to that point. If you want, you could call it a study in what the world might be like if human greed and corruption were allowed to run unchecked, but it’s far to celebrative of its own sex and violence to be taken seriously at that level. At the end of the day, this is just sick, twisted stuff for sick, twisted stuff’s own sake.

The film is visually distinctive, to be sure. (Like the comics, the film is primarily black-and-white, but with highly effective punctuations of color sprinkled throughout. The majority of it was filmed in color in front of a green screen, then converted to black and white and set against a computer-generated background.) To be brutally honest, though, this is just a stunt, and nothing more. It’s simply not that impressive coming from a Hollywood studio that you know has more money than God and can use computers to make a film look however they want. In any case, a cool look just isn’t enough to sustain a two-hour film. See the film if you like the whole “sick-and-twisted-because-we-like-it-that-way” sort of shtick; if you’re in it for the visual aspect, just watch the trailer and call it good.

7 Responses to “Sin City”

on Jun 17 2008 @ 3:05 pm 1. Thadd Harrington said …

It’s interesting, but a lot of people really like this movie and 300 for the exact same reason you feel they’re unnecesary. Couldn’t you say in a sense the comic book was the storyboard, and the movie was the story coming to life? That’s the only reasoning I could think of.

on Jun 17 2008 @ 3:23 pm 2. Luke Harrington said …

Yeah, you can look at it that way. Taken by itself, it’s not a terrible movie (just pretentious and morally bankrupt and completely unaware of its own irony) - but I really couldn’t get past how unjustified its existence was. The people who like this (and 300) are undoubtedly the same people who sit through The Lord of the Rings going “That’s not how it happened in the book!” If you really want what happened in the book, just read the @!#* book.

on Jun 17 2008 @ 4:44 pm 3. Thadd Harrington said …

Fair enough, but you gotta admit, some of the additions Peter Jackson made are not only stupid, they’re incredibly stupid. Like that part in The Two Towers where Aragorn falls over the cliff and “dies”. Yeah, that’s about as believable as the headline “Superman is Dead” in Superman Returns. I mean, c’mon, the title of the third movie The Return of the King.

on Jul 03 2008 @ 12:53 pm 4. James said …

Aloha,

I saw and liked both this movie and 300, because I basically bought into the movie’s overall premise: Seeing the comic-book realized on screen.

I imagine that Alan Moore, creator of “V For Vendetta” , “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and the upcoming “Watchmen”, saw this film and was both satisfied and depressed at the same time… Satisfied because people liked a film that saw someone else’s work taken frame-for-frame and put on the screen, and depressed because… well… for pretty much the same reason.

And with the exception of “V For Vendetta”, a frame-by-frame re-telling of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” would’ve been WAY better than the piece of (crap) we ended up seeing in the theaters.

Mahalo,
James

on Aug 26 2008 @ 12:59 pm 5. G said …

So I just found this review since Evan linked to it in my comics piece. We have very, very different conceptions of this movie if you think it’s not aware of it’s own irony. Frank Miller has now descended into self-parody, but at the time of writing this dialogue, it seems pretty clear that he was pushing the noir conventions beyond any sensible level - deconstruction through excess.

There is no cannibalistic cabal; it’s just a priest and Elijah Wood.

Finally, even if a movie is a shot by shot recreation, it’s going to be a completely different experience than it would be if it was on the page. This movie is all about spectacle. You can bash spectacle if you want - plenty of people have - but I personally love a good spectacle. And as great as Miller’s art is, it brings a whole new dimension when the characters are 20 feet tall and the sound effects are audible.

on Aug 26 2008 @ 1:59 pm 6. Luke Harrington said …

In my review, I acknowledged something of an appreciation of the movie’s spectacle — heck, I gave it three stars, almost for spectacle alone (so I’m clearly leaning towards liking the film rather than disliking it…for whatever that’s worth). It’s hard to fully succeed on the strength of spectacle alone, though, particularly in a post-digital age.

I think you’re probably right about “deconstruction through excess” — I woudl say this aspect is definitely present in the comics, but some of it was lost in the transition to film. The whole thing just felt far more deadly serious than it should have. This is compounded somewhat, I think, by Miller’s insistence on having a clear distinction between heroes and villains in every storyline — a provision that serves to undermine the amorality he strives for. (Again, I think this could have been helped if they had chosen to focus on a single story, rather than trying to cram three into a two-hour film.)

I actually said “cannibalistic cartel,” not “cabal.” For what it’s worth, I just looked both words up, and I think you could make the case that two people could, in fact, constitute a “cabal”…but not so much a “cartel.” So I guess I struck out on that one. In any case, I was merely trying to be succinct in my phrasing. Shrug.