Comic book as storyboards. GREAT !! That's even better. REWRITE!! That's fantastic....

Rating: 10/10 (7 April 2005)

This is truly a movie for a fan of Frank Miller. It is simply and purely, the motion version of Sin City. This is also not to say that this movie is incomprehensible to a lay person. There is something for everyone, but this movie is specifically for the fan.
Sin City is a collection of comic mini-series (about 8, with some one-shots) published by Dark Horse Comics in the late 1980' and early 1990's. Sin City is comparable to Las Vegas, but Vegas of the fifties and sixties. It is less glitz and a lot more grit. The comics are almost completely drawn in chiaroscuro (black and white) and are very angular. There is very little detail to the characters. Blood is usually a white glob. There is some color, however. Some of the characters eyes, hair, or clothes sometimes get the Ted Turner treatment (but the rest usually is still black or white). The stories are also not treated linearly. They jump around and various characters throughout the stories intermingle ("everyone knows everyone kind of place", by reputation or otherwise). Sin City has it all : hookers, crooks, snitches, crooked cops and priests, dirty politicians, lawyers, gamblers, strippers, drunks, drug addicts, assassins, and regular Joes.
Rodriguez and Miller (who both have the directing credits) did an amazing job of copying and pasting from comic book into flesh and blood. This movie captures all the elements of the comic. First of all, the movie looks like the comic (not quite black and white, but definitely filtered). The city is dark, dingy and grimy. You can almost taste the 4 day old, tobacco laced coffee. It tastes like toast with a nice layer of dirt on top.
The majority of the story takes place around 3 of the mini-series (Sin City, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard; there is also a little bit from The Babe Wore Red). The cast is also a who's-who's of the Hollywood heavyweights. Just about everyone in Hollywood signed up to do this picture.
Sin City is the original mini-series, which tells the story of a brute named Marv, who wakes up with a dead girl next to him. He's got to find out what happened. The Big Fat Kill is about a guy named Dwight who gets into a situation at his girlfriend's house, when her drunk old boyfriend shows up. That Yellow Bastard is the story of a tough, untouchable, old cop named Hartigan. Hartigan's final case (before retirement) has him looking for a child rapist/murderer.
It would have been nice if they introduced us with A Dame to Kill For instead of The Big Fat Kill. That way we would have gotten more background on Dwight. Even though the characters have a past and history, that isn't important. The comic books follow a film noir plan. The assumption here is that we don't get all the information on the characters. We have to accept them for what they are showing and piece together their past from their interactions. Its a detective novel wrapped up in an action thriller. The dialog is typical of what one would find in a film noir classic (think Bogart, but not quite as good, with some swearing - also lots of internal monologuing in a trench coat). I can forgive most of the dialog because it is suppose to be a little hokey. That is, what I thought was the weakest part of the entire movie. The rest is just marvelous. Some of the stories started up a little slow, but as soon as we got mid way into it, the action would kick in. This is a visually stunning looking movie. Thats the movie's (and the comic's) strength. It pulls you into the world. The action is fast and furious. At times it is staccato (jumps from kill to kill in a faced past motion - we don't linger on a kill) and at others its is quite over the top (i.e. - the end of The Big Fat Kill). I highly recommend this film for fans of film.