Style isn't enough

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2014)

Few movies are as stylish or as visually striking as Sin City. The movie looks spectacular, featuring beautiful black-and-white cinematography with little splashes of color which are used to very good effect. The visual effects are very well done which is rather important since the entire movie is basically one visual effect after another. So, in adapting Frank Miller's famous graphic novels, Robert Rodriguez unquestionably got the look right. But while the look of a film is important ultimately success or failure is determined by the story. The story is always the most important thing. And in Sin City the story, or in the case of this particular movie multiple stories, disappoints. Miller's tales may have worked very well in graphic novel form. But something has been lost in translation.
The movie tells three stories which are only very loosely connected. Unfolding in a very strange, ultra-violent, rather corrupt metropolis each story centers on a good guy taking down a bad guy or two. And these good guys have a lot to say which brings us to the movie's first problem, an unrelenting voice-over narration which wears thin very quickly. Each hero narrates his own story and they narrate pretty much every single second of them. These guys just will not shut up. Never is there a peaceful, quiet moment to let the movie breathe. And this movie could sure use a little peace and quiet mixed in with all the bloody violence. By the time one of our heroes carries on a running conversation with a dead man you're quite ready to put your fingers in your ears. But the movie still has a long way to go from that point. And at times it's quite a painful slog. Even with all the action and mayhem the movie manages to, quite remarkably, be rather boring.
All that style but so little humanity, that pretty much sums up Sin City. Very rarely does the movie make you actually feel anything. Of the three heroes it's the old cop Hartigan, played by Bruce Willis, who comes across the best. You really do root for him in his noble quest. Nobility is in short supply in Sin City. Mickey Rourke plays hero number two, Marv, who wakes up next to a murdered woman and vows to avenge her death. A solid performance from Rourke but Marv is a tough guy to root for. As heroes go he's a rather brutal one. The lines between good and bad, hero and villain, are often blurred in Sin City. At times those lines are wiped away completely as is the case with Dwight. Clive Owen plays this guy, a man with a sketchy past, who in the course of trying to protect the city's prostitutes (bad-ass girls who really don't need his protection) eventually finds himself in the aforementioned conversation with a corpse. It's this segment which really grinds the movie's momentum to a halt. And the movie never really recovers. There are some big moments, some cathartic triumphs. But there's also so much stuff which is entirely mundane. And will those narrators please shut up? The star-studded ensemble cast does the best they can with the material. Willis is very good, Rourke does well with a challenging role. With the possible exception of Jessica Alba who's a little flat (a problem since her character is the heart of the film's most emotional story) all involved do fine work. But the stories, at least as they're presented here, just don't work well enough. Sin City is a spectacular-looking movie. But movies can't get by on their looks.