"An old man dies. A young girl lives. Fair trade. I love you Nancy"

Rating: 9/10 (19 October 2006)

I bought this on DVD days ago and decided to watch it on a night time to get that that dark and gloomy mood that people who've seen it was talking about. So, the film starts in this balcony of a building or som'n and we see The Salesman (Josh Hartnett) kill an unlucky target. Then, we see ourselves in a prologue of one of the three story lines "The Yellow Bastard". Hartigan (Willis) rescues an 11 year old Nancy Callahan from a freak pedophile nincompoop from the powerful Roark family, Junior Roark. This is the first scene where we see the brutality, Hartigan shoots Junior like it was traget practice and he shoots his "manly organ" off. But then, out of the blue, Hartigan's long-time partner, Bob (Michael Madsen) backstabs Hartigan and shoots him like he was target practice, thus, the tagline "Hell of a way to end partnership". Bob was on Roark's payroll, so it has got to be done.
The next scene delves us in the second storyline, "The Hard Goodbye". Its basically about Marv (Mickey Rourke) killing his way through the top and finds the murderer who killed Goldie (Jaime King) while she is sleeping with him. The dialogue in this part is outstanding and Mickey Rourke portrays Marv like he IS Marv. Minor characters in this part includes Kevin, (Elijah Wood) a cannibalistic SOB who eats prostitutes for dinner. LITERALLY. We also see some of the Old Town prostitutes like Gail (Rosario Dawson) who has a much bigger role in "The Big Fat Kill" and Wendy (also portrayed by Jaime King) who is actually Goldie's twin sister. Like all movies, the protagonist kills the antagonist brutally and the protagonist dies with content. Marv got his revenge.
The next storyline (The Big Fat Kill) is about Dwight McCarthy (Clive Owen) whos trying to save Old Town from the evil dictator and mercenary Manute (Michael Clarke Duncan). Nothing to talk much about this storyline but this was also good. Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson and Clive Owen gives off a good performance and as usual, its brutality at its finest. After Dwight offs Manute and his thugs and restores the truce between Old Town and the cops we return to "The Yellow Bastard". We see a bed-ridden Hartigan and Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) who tells him that when Hartigan is up and running, he will connect all the crimes (child molesting and the castration of Junior) to him and he'll serve jail time. Hartigan with all his misery gives up and loses hope but that ended when Nancy writes to him every thursday under the name "Cordelia" and with all his happiness, decides to live and content with the letters he receives. Then, the Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) comes in and gives him a bloodied letter with a finger in it. Thinking that Nancy's in danger, he gets out of jail and tracks Nancy. And tracked her he did. He found a now 19 year old Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) in an erotic club with The Yellow Bastard hot on its tail. Hartigan lead the Yellow Bastard directly right to Nancy. With a few twists and turns, Hartigan ended up killing Junior by literally smashing him to bits and castrated his "manly organ" again. The sad part is, he kills himself because when he killed the Yellow Bastard, the son of the powerful Senator Roark, he lit up the match that'll make the Senator blow up and thinks that he'll do anything to kill him and Nancy. "An old man dies. A young girl lives. Fair trade".
The film, set in black and white and with the occasional touch of colors like the Customer's red gown, Becky's blue eyes and Manute's golden right eye. Robert Rodriguez with the special directing of Quentin Tarantino, gives us a new but an entirely new film in its genre. The brutality, the lighting, the score, the directing and the grimy and dark locales of Sin City makes this film attracts to the audience and one of its kind. Kudos to the people who've worked hard to create such a visual masterpiece. 10/10.