High POW Factor for Audacious Thrill Ride Into Sin City

Rating: 8/10 (14 December 2005)

A visually audacious movie and an unpredictably wild ride into palookaville, this is one unique film viewing experience. I am not familiar with Frank Miller's "Sin City" graphic novels, but my guess is that Miller, who shares a co-director credit with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, has remained faithful in capturing the hard-boiled, crime-infested world of Basin City and its cynical inhabitants. It takes a visual cue from last year's "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" by green-screening the backdrops and using digitally-produced images as the landscape, but that's where the similarity ends. Instead of Sky Captain's sepia shadings, this one is in vividly rendered black-and-white with carefully selected splashes of color (perhaps inspired by Steven Spielberg's use of a red coat in the otherwise black-and white "Schindler's List"). It evokes the perfect feeling for its modern-day film noir sensibilities which includes pulp fiction-type dialogue and a rogue's gallery of exaggerated characters, some made up in prosthetics to make you think you've landed in the dark side of a Dick Tracy comic strip. But Miller's world feels much different, at once capturing the cartoonish, highly stylized violence of Quentin Tarnatino's films (he is identified as "Special Guest Director" though I'm unclear what he exactly did) and the special effects-driven black humor of Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her" (which coincidentally also starred Bruce Willis).
The plot revolves around three separate stories that share some of the supporting characters but little more than that story-wise. Continuing to improve and deepen with age, Willis plays a tough-talking cop named Hartigan in the first one. Just before accepting his pension, he pursues one last case to save an 11-year old girl from the clutches of a murderous psychopath who happens to be the son of a US senator. The girl grows up to be a stripper, played blandly by a Lolita-esquire Jessica Alba. Completely unrecognizable as the actor who once enticed and coerced Kim Basinger in Adrian Lyne's "9 1/2 Weeks", Mickey Rourke portrays Marv, a contract killer who falls in love with a beautiful hooker who is murdered in her sleep. His journey in finding her killer creates the most concurrently harrowing and darkly hilarious joyride in the movie, replete with decapitated heads of beautiful women mounted on a wall, a mute psycho-killer played by Elijah Wood (stunt casting for sure but intriguing in exposing a dark side to his Frodo persona) and a comic electric-chair execution scene. Rourke is a revelation, grotesquely ugly and built like a Mac truck but strangely insightful and impervious to what happens to his character. The third story is the most surreal with a monotone-voiced Clive Owen, an almost heroic fugitive named Dwight, who saves a mouthy barmaid (an annoying Brittany Murphy) and a gang of empowered prostitutes (led by his former lover played in convincing dominatrix fashion by Rosario Dawson) from a corrupt cop. A Cyrano-nosed Benicio del Toro portrays the cop with his trademark fiery menace in what feels like a throwback to his career before "Traffic". Dead people don't stay dead in any of the stories, but in this one, the concept is taken to an extreme, and the clutches between Owen and Dawson amid the violence provide a surprisingly amusing touch.
Everybody seems to be having a good time, and it's nice to see some otherwise under-the-radar actors get a chance to chew on some scenery in atypical roles, chief among them Carla Gugino as a perennially nude lesbian parole officer, Nick Stahl as the senator's son who becomes the comically disgusting Yellow Bastard, and in seething, whatever-happened-to-them cameos, Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer. All the ingredients are so over-the-top that I was hoping the three stories would synthesize more than they do perhaps in the hope of a greater untapped theme. Moreover, for a movie so dependent on style to sustain itself over its two-hour-plus running time, it does feel a bit overlong and at times, repetitive in its visual elements. After all, one can take in only so many severed heads and limbs and heads shoved in toilets, as well as the inordinate amount of blood splattering in colors ranging from red to white to yellow. But no matter, as Rodriguez and Miller have fashioned something quite startling and entertaining here, a comic book come to life. Not for everyone's tastes but this is fun for those willing to take the ride.