Overrated

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2005)

I was stunned by the reviews Sin City received. I was not bothered by the gore - I did think it lacked subtlety, though. The mistake was giving Miller such a presence - the man is a COMIC BOOK writer, not a novelist. He has no mind for character development or good dialogue - things that, you know, real writers are concerned with.
The easiest example is the scene where Michael Madsen shows up to talk Bruce Willis out of going after the pederast in the first scene after the dreadful Josh Hartnett voice over vignette. In three lines, Madsen ticks down that they've been partners thirty years, this is a mistake, blah blah blah... a complete lack of imagination went into the dialogue and voice overs in the film.
The voice overs are another problem, as there is a glut of them, and none of them do much to further our understanding of the story - honestly, they don't. Given that comic book conventions and clichés are known by virtually the entire movie going audience, I'm sure we could understand what's going on without the gravel-voiced, over-wrought inner workings of these anti-heroes.
Another problem was the non-concurrent story-lines. It worked in Pulp Fiction because Tarantino is a great writer and director with good awareness of what works and what doesn't, and because the story lines coincided at meaningful points. Here, the approach is scattershot, and perhaps one of the reasons it doesn't work is because Robert Rodriguez is an awful director. How could you possibly think Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico are any good, if you've seen them? The sense I got from the characters is that Miller was smitten with his characters - he couldn't believe how cool they are! The most gratuitous scene was the one where Mickey Rourke visits his parole officer - partly because she saunters, topless, around a man apt to become a psychopath without his medication, and partly because "she could get any man she wanted with that body of hers" but won't, because she's a lesbian. That's a 17-year old writer's insight. I'm not talking about the line, I'm talking about the whole scene. It just seemed like a really cool thing for Rourke to say at that time. Whatever. Rodriguez has similar flourishes with his own characters, usually involving slow-motion scenes of pistols popping out of sleeves and bazooka guitar cases. Please.