Pop Art

Rating: 7/10 (6 June 2005)

Every year we're lucky enough have a fresh comic book adaptation forced down our throats like one of Buffalo Bill's chrysalises but here's something a bit different - a comic book adaptation of a movie. Sin City is a paper to celluloid transfer for Frank Miller's bleak Film Noir pastiche, now itself a Noir but one with a level of stylisation unprecedented in the genre. Rodrigeuz and Miller have fashioned a movie in which every shot is a meticulous recreation of the source graphic novels. The ontology of these shots even mirror the books because it's all been painted in using computer graphics. The plot, three stories set in a metropolis of human filth and brutality is pitched, as you might expect in the event of having the author as Co-director and screenwriter, perfectly in a recreative style that renders the men as aggressive, nihilistic, tortured characters loyal only to themselves and their own moral code and women as objects of lust - sexual objects through and through. Fans of Film Noir should love it frankly - it's all moody streets lit in shadow (though not really of course), voice-over narration, murky criminality and femme fatales. The misogyny will be unpalatable for some but that's the genre kids, this isn't a documentary and such criticism has no place in this kind of movie. The male oriented approach that the material demands allows for a great deal of violence which I enjoyed enormously. On the subject of the women incidentally, they're as gorgeous as the men are aggressive and Lucille's breasts in particular deserve to be awarded a couple of Oscars in-addition to the striking visual effects which mix beautifully toned chiaroscuro virtual sets with some striking and clever use of colour. If there's any criticism to be had its that the film's strength, its rigidly faithful recreation of the source material could also be construed as its weakness. For all its energy and vivid visuals it lacks depth, inevitable when your characters are direct recreations of comic book characters. They're types rather than fully three dimensional human beings and so lack the humanity of the heroes or rather antiheroes that populated the great Noirs of the 40's. Sin City also has the occasional slow moment and some moments of humour that feel like false notes in an otherwise watertight production. Not perfect then but when you consider that this is the first movie since Beaty's Dick Tracy (1990) that has successfully presented itself as a living comic book and goes further than that film ever could, its something of a new sub-genre and if the sequels are crafted with the same care and attention to detail as this film then we should be in for a bit of a treat - the visual equivalent of a giant slab of chocolate cake. It's a bit too insubstantial for my taste but I can't say I didn't enjoy visiting Sin City and its lavishly created world.