Reprehensible piece of trash

Rating: 1/10 (3 April 2005)

Sin City is a film geek's dream, all style and violence, an homage not only to the comics that spawned them but to Tarantino-esque gore and violence; it's even shot in black and white, features 'edgy' story material, anti-heroes, and gratuitous amounts of attractive female flesh. I'm sure the internet film geeks have already erected a shrine to this film. But unlike them, I have not come to praise Miller (or really Rodriguez), but to bury him.
Rodriguez does, in fact, manage the near impossible feat of capturing Miller's noir style in an interesting way. I was worried that what worked for the comics wouldn't work for the movies, but Rodriguez pulls it off. Sin City looks like its graphic antecedents, and the sparse use of spot color echoes Miller's style and carries much of the same impact. While Miller's people rarely resemble real humans any more (except the always curvaceous women), I felt most of the casting was good too. Mickey Rourke is hidden behind a thick layer of prosthetics as one of the main characters, Marv, but it somehow actually works in the film. I think probably I liked Bruce Willis' Hartigan the best, but then I liked his story arc the most as well.
The problem, sadly, is not with the visuals, where I thought it would be. The problem isn't even with the storytelling  although the narrative voices of the characters are so monotonous and so similar that you more or less lose track of who's doing what to who because they all speak with the same burned-out hard-ass gravelly self-deprecating voice. The problem is simply that the shorthand Miller used in the comics does not translate well to the screen, at all. Sin City on the page is a violent, dirty place, and it is so in the movie; but the insanely high level of sadism is far less shocking on the page than it is on the screen. Sin City plays like a two hour seminar in violence desensitization; every single imaginable physical cruelty  from eye-gouging to castration, from severed limbs to bullwhipping, to a lot, lot more  is played out in stark black and white. As if that weren't bad enough  and if you think it's not, you have bigger issues than I do, friend  what makes it even worse is that the film revels in the violence. In the comics, when these lunks go off to commit their mayhem, while they throw themselves into it, there's always an undertow of regret to it, of resignation, of knowing what they do damns them. But here, the committing of acts of unspeakable violence somehow seem to justify and redeem the characters; the more disgusting things you do in the name of revenge, the greater a hero you are. I cannot think of a single message more repugnant or reprehensible to send.
To me Sin City, while perhaps an interesting visual exercise (though honestly I wasn't that captivated), is little more than an excuse to show blood and boobs for two hours. I could get the same thing with a little less style (and maybe Joan Severance instead of Jessica Alba) from a direct-to-video shlocker that at least knew it was a borderline snuff film and didn't have the pretensions to art. Sin City is two hours of repetitive, relentless sadism, wrapped up in an artsy package. With all that talent, with all the effort and work (and it's there), it's a shame they managed to miss the underlying message in all of Miller's comics  that the descent into this lifestyle can only end one way, and it's not good. The very heart, as it were, of Miller's message in the books, completely missing from the film. Rodriguez got all the trappings right, he just sort of missed the point. But so, then, did most of the fans.