Minor Quibbles

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2005)

First thing's first: Good movie. Very, very good movie. But not great. Let me be clear, I saw this movie on opening weekend with four friends, two of them HUGE and well-versed fans of the graphic novels, and a third who had just read them the week before. Among them, they had zero complaints. So maybe I'm splitting hairs. You tell me--
First, and most obvious to me, was the fact that no actor ever stood more than 10 feet away from the camera. In close-ups, this isn't a problem, but in every group shot or wide shot, the actors were ALWAYS in the foreground, and never spaced very far apart, depth-wise. After 20 minutes, I could start to see where the green screen hung on the back wall. Not literally, of course, but I had a pretty good idea. In the "Big Fat Kill" sequence, when the cops chase Jackie-Boy's gang into Old Town, there are four or five hookers who show up to watch... they're ALL in the foreground, on the same corner, just extras who walk in and flash their g-strings at the camera. To me, that's the most obvious example, but again, I could be nitpicking.
Second, there was no dramatic arc. Zero. The graphic novels felt real, because with a hundred still-shots making up a book, your brain fills in the rest. With a motion picture, in this case, filling in the rest FOR me, I didn't find it as affecting. A character dies, a character is injured, beaten, kissed, I felt nothing. In the books it was real, because Frank Miller's incredible artwork evoked the emotion he was going for in any individual frame: fear, terror, revulsion, lust. In the movie, with a familiar face filling in, the actors LOOK like their characters, but they don't INHABIT them. The best way around that, of course, is to cast no-names, but I understand it's tough to market a movie like that. So there we are.
Beyond that, I still have to say I enjoyed the movie. The visuals were stunning, both Miller's original work, and Rodriguez's interpretation of it to turn it into a real place. I just missed the character, which isn't usually present in an action movie anyway, but, y'know, it was in the books, so... maybe it's just me. 8/10.