accessAtlanta

'Sin City': Graphic zeal, but words fail the film

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

Author and artist Frank Miller is an icon of macho in the comic-book world, known for a powerful graphic style and a fondness for testing the limits of an already hyperbolic medium. After pushing grim vigilantism to the brink of parody with his ultraviolent 1980s reinvention of Batman, Miller shifted his focus from a legendary hero to an entire genre; without a well-known character to lend it a soul, the crime series "Sin City" was an exercise in pure, pedal-to-the-floor style. You'd have to be emotionally stunted to take the stories seriously, but they were a lot of fun to read.

Dimension Films 'Sin City' 2 out of 5 stars Directors: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez Starring: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson Run time: 126 minutes Release date: April 1, 2005 Rating: R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Sin City"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

So it's to be expected that, from its opening scene, "Sin City" the film sounds like a "Saturday Night Live" riff on hard-boiled fiction. The lines are corny, delivered cartoonishly and full of deliberately dumb epithets. So far, so good, sort of.

And in one way, the film (co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself) is almost perfect: It is difficult to imagine another movie capturing the comic's look with any more accuracy and brio than this one. Employing the stark black-and-white of the comic and (as the series' covers did) lacing it with potent bursts of color — a dame's red lips, blond curls or pulsing green eyes, for instance — it mimics the artist's bold compositions.

Rodriguez and company use prosthetic makeup, digital manipulation and plain old attention to detail to get things right, from the way individual raindrops gleam to the dispassionate expression on Elijah Wood's face just before he gets what's coming to him. There are probably only two ways the film's look could have been improved: It could have used real cars instead of digital re-creations, which zoom around here without any believable weight; and it could have compensated for the fact that depicting bloody wounds as white splotches looks fine on the black-and-white printed page, but resembles bird droppings when done in a live-action film.

Problems arise, though, for viewers who expect "Sin City" to do more than look gorgeous. Fans who relish the visceral kicks of the comic, or newcomers expecting an action movie, might be surprised at how little punch this flick packs. Not that it's short on violence — hacksaws meet flesh, bullets pierce groins, Bruce Willis has a heart attack every 15 paces — or that Rodriguez is unwilling to join in Miller's lewd appreciation of the big-haired, big-bosomed inhabitants of Sin City's prostitute-run "Old Town." The problem is that there's a barrier between the audience and the sex and violence on the screen.

That barrier is Rodriguez's incessant use of voiceover narration, which is so prevalent here (tough to recall another film that uses so much) that it's almost shocking when our tough-guy antiheroes move their lips. Fans will understand why Rodriguez does it — first-person storytelling is the spine of Miller's Spillane-on-steroids world — but film noir connoisseurs will remember more engaging adaptations that skirted this trap. In "The Big Sleep," for instance, the filmmakers discard Raymond Chandler's internal monologue in favor of action and dialogue. Even Chandler's immortal language wasn't worth retaining at the expense of character interaction — and Frank Miller is no Raymond Chandler. (Many classic noirs use voiceover, of course, but they're wise enough to know when to step away from that and into the action.)

One noteworthy spot where voiceover takes a back seat, incidentally, is in a scene "guest directed" by Quentin Tarantino. The switch-up is a joke, in fact: It's one place in the story where the voices really don't exist outside a character's head.

Echoes of Tarantino hang over this project, from that guest spot, to the way the movie uses Willis, to the film's structure, which cobbles together three main "Sin City" storylines with overlapping chronology, ˆ la "Pulp Fiction." As the timeline doubles back on itself and we return to a plot we thought was finished, the film does shake off some of its alienating fog; many members of the cast (Clive Owen, for one) exude chiseled cool, but toward the end Willis comes closest to making us relate to his dark knight's mission.

By this point, many viewers will have drifted away completely and others will be drawing up comparisons to "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," another gee-whiz digital project with unimpeachably cool looks and insufficient soul. As a test-reel to show off Robert Rodriguez's pet technologies, or as a fetish object for comics fans, "Sin City" is praiseworthy. As a stand-alone piece of cinema, it has a few Hail Marys to say.