Urban blight...

Rating: 1/10 (5 April 2005)

The trick is not in creating a unique world vision for a movie; any director with a competent cinematographer and set designer (or computer technician) can accomplish that. The trick is sustaining that vision for the course of the movie; making the style of the movie to be more than just a gimmick. This is obvious in films like NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, BLADE RUNNER, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, or even in more mainstream films like CHICAGO or DICK TRACY -- or even YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. The style is part of the story, not something that overwhelms it. Robert Rodriguez, to his credit, at least tries to achieve this in the comic book epic SIN CITY, but in the end, style is the only point to the film. Take away the striking images and there is precious little -- or, at least, precious little that's worthwhile -- left to define the film.
Rodriguez apparently is very successful in replicating the bleak, gaudy, horrific nightmare world of Frank Miller's cruel and shallow graphic novels; the question is whether it was worth his effort. No matter how masterfully done Miller's art work might be, romanticizing evil, cruelty and violence can't make something that is intrinsically ugly suddenly beautiful. Likewise, the jazzed up facade of Rodriguez's dark, soulless fantasy can only temporarily hide its utter lack of humanity. Beneath its Gothic shell, SIN CITY is little more than a heartless, decaying corpse.
As in Kerry Conran's SKY CAPTAIN, SIN CITY uses blue screen techniques and computer graphics to meticulously create a unique worldly vision. Unlike SKY CAPTAIN, with its B-movie-inspired vision of cliffhanger heroics, SIN CITY is a morally muddy and sexually twisted wasteland, as devoid of heroes as it is of sunlight. The only thing black and white about the film is its cinematography; and, though it imitates Miller's style, it seems the only real purpose for the monochromatic imagery is that the selective use of superimposed color makes the film's liberal use of blood seem all the more lurid in its redness -- or whiteness or yellowness. Rodriguez's stark visuals grab your attention, for five or ten minutes; but quickly become as tediously pointless as the three turgid tales that unfold within.
The film relies on the good-bad-guy versus the bad-bad-guy code of ethics. In an obvious attempt to imitate PULP FICTION, Rodriguez gives us three sleazy story lines that vaguely interlock and unfold with a skewed chronology. Thus we get three good-bad-guys -- played by Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen -- each of whom is an amoral, sadistic, cold-blooded, misanthropic and psychotic killer. They are, however, paragons of virtue compared to their adversaries -- played by Nick Stahl, Elijah Wood and Benicio Del Toro, as bad-bad-guy killers who are even more amoral, sadistic, cold-blooded, misanthropic and psychotic. The fact that the tissue-paper thin personalities of the good-bad-guys are supposed to give them complexity is hardly sufficient to actually make us care about them. Though each are the lesser of two evils, they are evil just the same.
The stories are a crude and gruesome mix of sadomasochistic violence and soft-core porn. As envisioned by Miller and Rodriguez (with the dubious help of Quentin Tarantino), SIN CITY is a dysfunctional adolescent's fantasy, polluted by soured adult nihilism. This empty, grotesque landscape, seems to be what might exist in the mind of a frighteningly disturbed teenager: The characters who aren't presented as sideshow freaks are reduced to the level of vile stereotypes. Authority figures such as police, politicians and clergy are corrupt and ruthless. Women are sexually provocative caricatures who exist either to be used and abused and often violently killed, or are dangerous, scantily clad Amazon warriors with a bloodlust for emasculation. And being male is measured by the ability to endure violence with superhuman endurance, while vanquishing rivals with a casual disregard for mercy -- with castration being a preferred style of vengeance. If there is an underlying theme in SIN CITY it is a pitiable fear of sexuality on all levels.
Like so much that passes for stylish coolness in the Tarantino-influenced cinema, SIN CITY is really just a veg-a-matic hodgepodge of pop culture junk. It combines the hard-boiled narrative stylings of forties noir, the automotive snazziness of the fifties, the crude self-aware campiness of the sixties, the cinematic cynicism of the seventies and the slasher movie savagery of the eighties with the trendy Tarantino-inspired ironic sadism of the nineties. Yet, Rodriguez, no doubt, believes he is serving up something shockingly original -- and some critics seem to foolishly agree. But for all of its flamboyant attempts to shock and amaze, SIN CITY is little more than an extended pop culture slum; and its most profound feature isn't the look of this glamorized ghetto, but the unchallenged stench of moral decay that seeps up from the sewer that is the true heart of these desolate and mean streets.