empty, empty, empty

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2005)

SIN CITY is an okay movie, but bothersome. It's just empty, vigilante nihilism, basically, except for Bruce Willis' character. It's a set-'em-up, knock-'em-down kind of movie -- establish protagonist, establish villain, establish heinous deed(s), kill villain heinously; next story. The three main stories which make the lion's share of the movie are also pretty similar, so it gets repetitive and feels too long. There are lots of acts of violence, but for the most part they're very cartoonish, so we can squirm happily and know that nothing's really at stake -- certainly not our notions of the world or anything.
This is the part that bugs me: stuff like this and Kill Bill are these constructs, these exercises, just as much as something like Wimbledon or Summer Catch are. It doesn't bother me so much that we as an audience will go see a fluffy romantic comedy as it does that the better directors in the machine are now cranking out vengeance scenarios with witless but kind of inventive brutality, and that's our popcorn. I'm not thrilled with what that says.
There's nothing there; it's not like the constructions of, say, the Coens or Kubrick, which you can argue are cold, but at least are recognizably informed by life and thought; this stuff is informed by movies, basically, so you get hallmarks of characters without any fleshing out which really lets you get lost in that world. There's not a lot to think about when it's over (except how empty it is). And I know the argument against wishing for more is "it's just entertainment." Well, okay: then that turns it back to us. What are we seeking out as entertainment? But, yeah -- I bought my ticket, so I contributed. I should have gone with my instinct.
Yep -- it looks good, but that pleasure disappears pretty quickly. It's not Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- which was ridiculous in a whole other way -- but it suffers a similar effect: good technology just can't take the place of a gripping story. If this movie had been as cleverly plotted and populated as, say, Blood Simple, and we actually gave a damn about the characters except as action figures, it could've been a masterpiece; it had all the elements except for some bad acting here and there (Jessica Alba, and especially Michael Madsen, who is just awful).
It's just sad.