Sin City - Dayton Daily News

'Sin City': Amped-up reincarnation of film noir does a bang-up job

By DAVE LARSEN
Dayton Daily News

Sin City is like no place — and nothing — you've ever seen.

The stylish pulp thriller from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez brings Frank Miller's acclaimed graphic novel series to life, using digital technology to replicate Miller's chiaroscuro panels almost shot-for-shot.

Dimension Films

'Sin City'

B+

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.
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On the web
Official movie site
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Trailers require Quicktime

Beautiful black-and-white images, splashed with occasional swaths of color and copious amounts of blood, set the scene for three overlapping tales of revenge and redemption.

The stories unfold in the violent, nocturnal metropolis of the title and are presented out of sequence, like Quentin Tarantino's 1994 classic Pulp Fiction.

Visually, Sin City is a turning point — re-defining the medium's technical possibilities as much as the original Star Wars and Matrix films did in their day.

In terms of storytelling, it's a dark, gritty throwback to the hard-boiled crime novels and film noir thrillers of the 1940s and '50s.

Comic-book geeks and action-film freaks will love this unflinching, ultra-cool walk on the wild side. However, its sadistic violence — albeit stylized — may be too much for squeamish types.

Sin City's thugs, lowlifes and dames are portrayed by a stellar cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson, along with Brittany Murphy, Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jamie King and Michael Clarke Duncan, among many others.

Rodriguez, whose credits range from Desperado to Spy Kids, shares producing and directing credit with Miller, an artist and writer who reinvented the Batman mythos with 1986's The Dark Knight Returns.

Miller published seven Sin City volumes from 1991 to 2000. The film is drawn from The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard.

The Directors Guild of America threatened to shut the film down a week before shooting began over Rodriguez's shared credit with Miller, which violates DGA rules. Rather than dump Miller, Rodriguez quit the guild.

Pulp Fiction director and Rodriguez pal Tarantino serves as "special guest director" for one scene, a darkly funny exchange in a car between Owen and Del Toro, for which he reportedly was paid $1.

Despite their comic-book origins, Sin City's protagonists are hardly caped crusaders. Instead, they're tragic, gun-toting knights who attempt to save dark-city damsels in distress.

Willis plays Hartigan, a cop with a bum ticker who's out to protect a young girl from being raped by a senator's son (Nick Stahl).

Rourke is Marv — a hulking, hatchet-faced bruiser on a rampage to avenge the murder of a prostitute (King) who for one night made him feel human.

Owen is Dwight, a man on the lam with a brand-new mug, who wrangles with the berserk Jackie Boy (Del Toro) over a waitress (Murphy), and finds himself attempting to stave off a war in the streets of Old Town.

The trio shares some superhero attributes. Hartigan survives countless bullets to the torso; Marv launches himself boots-first through the windshield of an oncoming car; and Dwight leaps from a tall building unscathed.

All three are motivated by love and honor — rare qualities in Basin City, or 'Sin City for short.

Old Town is Sin City's seedy underbelly, where the protagonists variously cross paths and where order is maintained by the Old Town Girls, a lethal group of hookers led by Dwight's love, Gail (Dawson).

Rodriguez shot the grim crime saga at his digital production facility outside Austin, Texas. He filmed the actors against a giant green screen and added most of the backgrounds digitally in post-production, much like last year's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Far more satisfying than that film, the dazzling result finds live actors inhabiting Miller's pitch-dark pen-and-ink landscape.

Apart from bold slashes of color highlighting a character's piercing blue eyes or lustrous golden hair, it's all high-contrast monochrome. Several intense scenes play out in reverse silhouette, stark white on black.

Miller's spartan storytelling style has limitations. The film favors action over drama, and the characters don't run deeper than their original two dimensions.

Willis, playing yet another world-weary cop, doesn't captivate us like Rourke's sympathetic psychopath or Owen's chivalrous killer.

But Sin City is all about breathtaking visual style and poetic, pulpy dialogue.

Rodriguez, who also edited the film and collaborated on its evocative score, translates Miller's supposedly "unfilmable" cult comic to the screen in uncompromising fashion, as a live-action cartoon.

Film buffs who want to experience the digital feature as fully intended should catch it at Springdale Cinema de Lux 18, about 40 minutes south of Dayton, which has digital projection and sound. Sin City was screened there for media and its super-sharp visuals popped off the screen.

Sin City isn't for everyone, but those with a taste for hard-boiled thrills and cutting-edge cinema will want to visit again and again.