Sin City

[KLAXXON]

Dark and deadly, Sin City hits you right between the eyes with a striking blend of old school film noir and newfangled comicbook visuals.
Cinema's first literal adaptation of a comic book, this ferocious tale of thugs, prostitutes, murder and revenge is like nothing you've ever seen before.

Set in the fictional metropolis of Basin City and featuring a powerhouse cast including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Clive Owen, Sin City intertwines three stories from Frank Miller's notorious novels.

There's The Hard Goodbye, in which thug Marv (Rourke) seeks revenge for the death of a prostitute; The Big Fat Kill which sees private eye Dwight (Owen) help a gang of warrior prostitutes; and That Yellow Bastard, the tale of a cop's (Willis) battle against a child-killer.

Director Robert Rodriguez rewrites all the rules with a movie that is shot almost entirely against a green screen, with the backgrounds added during post production, and reproduced in glossy monochrome with poignant splashes of colour.

Sticking close to the noirish comic book mood, this movie is packed with hard-boiled dialogue, and barely a moment passes in this ultra violent movie when someone isn't being killed in some innovative and ghoulish fashion. The men are tough-talking monosyllabic types with high thresholds for pain, and the women wear very little.

Rodriguez has certainly come a long way since his no-budget debut triumph of El Mariachi in 1992, the first in the acclaimed trilogy, and what he did for the western he has more than achieved in this modern noir.

"I was a big fan of noir, I almost re-made Kiss Me Deadly back in 1997... but I was afraid to be too nostalgic," explains Rodriguez.

What I liked about Frank's material was that although it is in that tradition of noir, it was so updated, so savage and new that it wouldn't feel like a nostalgia trip. That's why I was really excited about this."

There's a little of Pulp Fiction in Sin City, both in the hipness and the jolt it gives audiences, and that's no surprise seeing as Quentin Tarantino shot a scene in the movie.

Rodriguez recalls: "I told him last year, it took him a while to make Kill Bill which he thought was going to be a very fast shoot but I told him if he'd shot it on digital, it would have been much faster. So I said the next time I was shooting something on digital, he should come and direct a sequence.
"We shot the scene with Clive and Benicio in the rain, on the road in a car - and there was no rain, no road and no car. He got to see how all that stuff went away and he could concentrate on getting a great performance from the actors".

Sin City is a rich and scintellating homage to Miller's work - but is there more to come?

Rodriguez says: "I know we're going to do the second one, that's based on A Dame To Kill For which takes place before these stories. So that would probably be the most interesting one to help complete this story".





It's going to be blood for blood and by the gallon - these are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days." That's a promise made good by Mickey Rourke's street tough psycho in the brash, beautiful and breathlessly violent Sin City. Frank Miller adapts his own graphic novels and co-directs with Robert Rodriguez to produce this fiercely original crime anthology that hits right between the eyes with a striking blend of old-school noir and newfangled comicbook visuals.

A fraying sense of morality weaves together three tales: Rourke is a lonely lunkhead hell-bent on avenging a murdered prostitute; Clive Owen is an ex-detective caught between the law and a gang of hookers; and Bruce Willis plays a craggy cop framed for raping the girl he's sworn to protect (Jessica Alba). This is a world where the line between right and wrong is blurred and expressed in steely shades of grey, occasionally broken by the ruby rich splatter of blood. It's all at once seedy and seductive..

"HUMOUR BLACK AS NIGHT"

Miller and Rodriguez amplify the hardboiled style with point-blank dialogue and humour black as night (at one point Owen chinwags with Benicio Del Toro's half-decapitated corpse). However, one snag of this high-concept approach is the instant barrier it creates, softening the impact of routine butchery, but also ruling out any chance of emotional involvement. Willis offers the most sympathetic portrayal, as well as the least self-conscious, but the emphasis is definitely not on shaping complex characters. Instead Sin City offers an intoxicating supply of guilty pleasure that makes Vegas look like Disney World.




Three hardboiled tales from Basin City, an American film noir community. Ex-con Marv (Rourke) avenges a murdered hooker, private eye Dwight (Owen) helps a red light district stay independent from the Mob and disgraced cop Hartigan (Willis) shields a dancer (Alba) from a psychotic sadist (Stahl).




Of all the comic-book adaptations that have ever been mounted, from Flash Gordon in 1936 to The Fantastic Four in 2005, this is liable to score highest in the ‘fan satisfaction’ category. No niggling here along the lines of “Spider-Man shouldn’t have organic web-shooters” or “Batman’s parents shouldn’t be shot by the Joker”. This collaboration between two one-man bands, comic-book writer-artist Frank Miller and director-writer-editor-cinematographer-producer Robert Rodriguez, is as faithful to the source material as those cheapo ’60s Marvel cartoons that panned over panels from the comics while voice-over artists read out the word balloons. Like most successful comics, Sin City created a recognisable concrete-but-unreal world. Miller mixed a stew of thugs in trenchcoats out of Chandler or Spillane, a spice of the ‘bad girl art’ that made paperback covers of the 1950s stand out from newsracks and a splash of the manga-ish stylised goriness which inspired movies buffs like Quentin Tarantino (who guest-directs one scene) have only recently discovered. The film exactly matches the look of the comic: stark black-and-white images, with the occasional shocking or beautiful splash of rich colour. Most modern noirs incline to the blacker side of monochrome, but Miller’s scratchboard techniques, adapted superbly by Rodriguez, often get the most impact out of white – the blank round reflections of a killer’s sunglasses, crosses of sticking-plaster on a much-wounded face, arterial gushes of milky blood.

The movie script also matches the original stories virtually word for word. The original mini-series was about Marv (perfectly incarnated here by comeback kid Mickey Rourke) an unstoppable but soft-hearted freak who avenges the murder of his sweetie-for-a-night by taking on a ghastly cannibal (a blank-faced, wordless, far-from-Frodo Elijah Wood). The film adapts this (later retitled The Hard Goodbye) and two of its follow-ups, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard, seemingly unconcerned about the similarities between the plots and characters, confident that the seductive images and picturesque people will hold the interest. Lifting structure from Pulp Fiction, which is hardly in a position to complain if it’s imitated, Sin City has top-and-tail scenes that frame the three episodes, which are told out of order.

Be warned, though – this is a working definition of a boys’ film. Men are either wounded, sensitive mass murderers (good guys) or repulsive, sadistic mass murderers (bad guys). Women are either improbably beautiful whores (good girls) or improbably beautiful pole-dancers (very good girls). Any exceptions, like Carla Gugino as a male-fantasy lesbian, tend to get killed off – nastily.

The extreme stylisation takes the sting out of the pandering, though, in that the hallucinatory female characters tend to be exploiting male desire while living their own lives removed from others’ ideas about them. Arguably, the male characters are even more of an insult to the sex; Rodriguez and Miller’s once-in-a-lifetime cast of bruised, near-unrecognisable faces bring to life an array of tarnished heroes, each tougher than Mike Hammer on steroids, and appalling villains who’d be too deformed and demented even for Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum.



Some women might deem this a two-star male fantasy of the sort they wish the men in their lives would grow out of. However, for the guys it’s Rodriguez’s best film by far and a treat for fans of good-looking girls in black-and-white, of classic film noir and of imaginative ultra-violence. It even has dinosaurs and a samurai chick…


Jessica Alba ...  Nancy Callahan
Devon Aoki ...  Miho
Alexis Bledel ...  Becky
Powers Boothe ...  Senator Roark
Cara D. Briggs ...  Hearing Panel Person (as Cara Briggs)
Jude Ciccolella ...  Liebowitz
Jeffrey J. Dashnaw ...  Motorcycle Cop (as Jeff Dashnaw)
Rosario Dawson ...  Gail
Jesse De Luna ...  Corporal Rivera
Benicio Del Toro ...  Jackie Boy
Jason Douglas ...  Hitman
Michael Clarke Duncan ...  Manute
Tommy Flanagan ...  Brian
Christina Frankenfield ...  Judge
Rick Gomez ...  Klump




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