The Sins of "Sin City"

Rating: 1/10 (6 September 2005)

There are challenging innovative movies, that you like before you understand. This is not one of them, although thousands of people seem to have been persuaded the contrary. There are plenty of violent and meaningless films, that one may enjoy thinking that life is, after all, often violent and meaningless. But "Sin City"'s Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller took good care to make you understand that their story has nothing to do with life: it's just a comic-book tale. So, this meaninglessness has really no meaning. There are movies that try to innovate by including techniques from other arts or media, e.g. comic books. But "Sin City" is entirely a comic-book made film, or rather a comic-book-turned-zoetrope. There are movies inspired by comic-books that are set in some sort of (dystopian) near future that could make (some) sense. This one, just like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" kept almost intact the "near future" of the '30s and '40s described in the original comic-book. But whereas "Sky Captain" seemed a playful gaze into the world of comics, "Sin City" takes itself seriously. Rodriguez shares with Tarantino and Tim Burton a fascination with the puerile world of "pulp fiction". But Burton (through his imaginative situations and settings) and especially Tarantino (through his effective art of funny absurd dialogue) take a witty distance. Rodriguez believes in the magical powers of hebetude. There are flawed intelligent movies. "Sin City" is a perfect dull one.