Robert Rodriguez and Frank Millers Legacy of Brutality

Rating: Null/10 (6 April 2005)

Sin City isn't the kind of movie you'd bring home to meet your mother. Mine would get along just fine with it but that's beside the point. The comic book was brilliant and the treatment in the hands of Hollywood studio system eschewing Robert Rodriguez the film is nothing short of a shotgun blast to the frontal lobewhich is good. The film is a series of vignettes which follow three lead characters through a never-never-land of torture, brutal beatings, evisceration, gorgeous women and enough munitions being spread across the black and white CGI night to make your head spin. Sin City follows Marv (brilliantly portrayed by Mickey Rourke) across a landscape of hard drinking, pill popping, delusional revenge. Detective Hartigan (a wonderfully hard nosed Bruce Willis) the one good cop in Sin City, a fictional but oddly Los Angelesque nightmare town, takes a dive to save a little girl (who grows up to be Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba)), and Dwight (Clive Owen, well played but a little trouble with the accent) puts his head (or a head anyway) on the line to help out a group of ladies of negotiable affection. What Miller (who's listed as a co-director) does with his work is go beyond paying homage to the greats of noir fiction. He takes the seediness and grit of Hammett, Chandler, and Leonard and puts them under a microscope. His artistry was brought to life by director Robert Rodriguez and his Renegade Studios in an astounding assault of computer effects and smears them across the silver screen in a way that frankly the usual action film schlock fails miserably to do. Rodriguez (and in one key scene Quentin Tarrantino) create a hellish vision on screen, they take their medium and push it for all it's worth. We have enough films with Drew Barrymore thank-you, let's burn something into the celluloid that burns back. But Sin City isn't for the faint of heart. Is the film violent? The film glorifies violence to an astonishing degree, artistically and stylishly enough that it brings a tear to the eye, but still. If you are the type of person who has a good deal of trouble separating what you are seeing on the magic screen from reality or are unstable (I suppose the first bit is the unstable but I want the warning to include all of those who are "differently" sane), not a good film for you. Is there sex? Er, well some, there's a lot of nudity anyway. It is however a film based on a comic book whose primary characters were all killers, cops and prostitutes so you have to expect corruption and brutality. The killers and prostitutes are fairly rough trade as well. What Sin City becomes in the hands of Rodriguez that has escaped the grasp of every preceding Hollywood director who has gotten their greasy media pandering mitts on a comic book is a faithful retelling. What your seeing on the screen is an almost scene-for-scene, frame by frame rendering of Millers ode to noir, and that's the best bit of all.