An extremely entertaining, innovative experience. And Mickey Rourke is BACK!

Rating: 9/10 (12 June 2005)

There have been some rather faithful comic-book adaptations in the past (particularly recently) but "Sin City" takes it to another level entirely  it mixes the medium with another, taking away the familiarity and standards of cinema and replacing them with new styles and techniques.
The first thing I noticed was the pacing  it's totally off. The movie skips from one scene to the next with free abandon. As a result of this, the characters are never really given much depth, the dialogue is unbelievably stiff and the acting is wooden. This would never receive a passing grade in film school. "Sin City" is  by almost any acceptable standards  a rebel. It doesn't even attempt to blend in with the rest.
And yet this may very well be the next "Pulp Fiction." It's entirely appropriate, seeing that Quentin Tarantino is attached to it (and even "guest directs" a scene in the film). He's also the best friend of Robert Rodriguez, who shares directorial credit here with graphic novel artist Frank Miller. (He has a cameo as a priest whom Mickey Rourke kills.) This is a bloody, brilliant masterpiece of invigorating cinema  one of the best examples of how a film can become a testosterone ride, a breathtaking tour de force of images, exotic settings and virulent, destructive images. On top of this, it's the most misogynistic mainstream American motion picture I can remember in years, matching the sexist misdemeanor of the crude sex films of the 1980s  but even then women were treated as unattainable objects. In "Sin City," women live their lives to please their men  they are beaten to a pulp, shot, tortured, hacked away at and stabbed when they disobey.
No, "Sin City" is more like a trip back to the 1970s, when Burt Reynolds got away with slapping a woman across the face in the opening credits of "The Longest Yard" and lived to tell about it. Thirty years later, the remake stars Adam Sandler, and is rated PG-13.
To see a movie like "Sin City" exist in this day and age is a miracle  I thought the producers would have stopped reading the script after the part where a brute named Marv dismembers a man and hand-feeds his limbs to a dog  all shown clear as day on the screen.
Is this a good thing? I'm not saying it is. We don't need to see a woman being beaten on-screen for no reason, nor do we need exploitative violence  but "Sin City" doesn't use its violence for shock value. It's vital to the stories. Taking away the violence from "Sin City" would undoubtedly leave nothing other than a standard PG-13 action film  you have to hand it to Rodriguez, he aimed to make a good movie rather than sell out for the cash.
"Sin City" opens like a kick in the face, displaying the narrator (Josh Hartnett), a hit-man, as he introduces the world of Basin City, a dark and smoggy place nowhere in particular, where crime runs rampant.
Soon we're following Marv (Rourke), a worn-out ex-con who is framed for the murder of a prostitute named Blondie (Jaime King). Marv swears a vow of vengeance and sets out to obliterate the soul who killed "his Blondie"  even if it means crippling the innocents who interfere.
After that story ends, another begins  a thug named Dwight (Clive Owen) fights a corrupt cop (Benicio Del Toro), the latter of whom winds up dead. This storyline essentially follows Dwight's struggles to get rid of the body  with the help of a pack of inner-city hookers who are afraid the police will invade their turf if the crime is revealed.
Lastly we have a mini-narrative following convicted cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis), who saves a young girl named Nancy from a pedophile. He's sent to jail after the Senator  who happens to be the father of the pedophile  pins the crime on Hartigan. Flash forward a few years and he's out of jail on a mission to save Nancy, now 18 (and played by Jessica Alba), from the same creep. (Played eerily well by Nick Stahl.) The movie never slows down or runs out of steam. It just keeps going and going, becoming bloodier and more gut-wrenchingly brutal as its runtime elapses. I can't recall a single moment that went on too long.
The best storyline is probably Marv's. "Sin City" has gotten a lot of publicity on behalf of Rourke  they're claiming this is his big comeback. I hope so. Rourke has long been one of my favorite actors and he is absolutely stunning as Marv, totally disguised under a layer of makeup and bandages.
Marv narrates his own story like a gasoline-chugging tobacco addict, his voice raspy and gruff; Rourke's boxing years pay off, as his bulky physique totally eclipses those around him. "Pulp Fiction" had Travolta and "Sin City" has Rourke -- I can't wait to see where this takes his career.
Don't get me wrong, though. The acting is bad. Purposefully so, too. The actors really ham it up, and the dialogue redefines stiff. If this were a serious film, I'd have been cringing throughout  but it's not. It is an homage to film noir and a thematic translation of the graphic novels. In that perspective, the cheesy qualities are absolutely perfect.
I have never read a single "Sin City" graphic novel, but after seeing this, I feel as if I have. Rodriguez has remained faithful to his sources and created a dazzling new form of film-making; expect to see more of these kinds of movies in the future. (And I'm not just talking about sequels.)