‘Sin City’

The story and characters are as tired as the look is invigorating in this adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel series.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
Sin City.>
   Like the pneumatic babes that stalk its mean streets, Sin City packs a surprisingly hard punch. Sure, it’s beautiful, but what makes it interesting is that it looks like no other movie you’ve ever seen. In the early-21st-century transition from film to digital video, Sin City stands out as a significant milestone.
   Co-director Richard Rodriguez, who shoots, edits and scores his generally low-budget, high-body-count movies out of his own studio in Austin, has been championing HD (high-definition) digital video ever since he used it for 2003’s Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. But what initially attracted him to HD — and before that, to the VHS he used to shoot his first movie, El Mariachi, for the much-publicized sum of $7,000 — was pure pragmatism: video cameras are much cheaper and easier to use than 35 mm film equipment. That appealed to the prolific director, whose movies are usually more energetic than elegant, and who likes to keep costs low enough so he can maintain control of his work. But Rodriguez seems to have discovered the artistic possibilities of HD with Sin City.
   To turn Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novel series into a movie, Rodriguez enlisted Miller as co-director (Rodriguez’s pal Quentin Tarantino also directed one sequence, a car ride taken by Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro). Together, the two rejuvenate the played-out comic book movie genre by bringing three Sin City graphic novels to life, panel by panel. Storylines, characters, even camera angles, are all taken from the books, with thought bubbles turned into voiceovers, dialogue left intact, and characters and settings faithfully recreated to concoct what Rodriguez calls "a living graphic novel."
   The actors were shot almost entirely against green screens and settings were filled in later via computer, allowing the filmmakers to clone the glitter and grime of Miller’s urban dystopia. Using digital video also allowed the filmmakers to get true blacks and whites rather than the shades of gray that make up most of what passes for black and white in film. Sin City’s rich blacks and crisp whites crackle and pop, especially in contrast to the occasional blossom of color, like the red of a woman’s dress, the green of her eyes, or the toxic-waste yellow of one villain’s skin and blood. As Rodriguez said in an NPR interview, it’s "the punchiest, most bold black-and-white you’ve ever seen, basically pen and ink on the screen."
   If everything else were as fresh as the visuals this would be a great movie. Unfortunately, the story and characters are as tired as the look is invigorating, so it ultimately feels static despite all the manic action.
   Miller, who calls his hardboiled heroes "knights in blood-caked armor," says comic artists tend to create stories about things they like to draw. In his case, he told NPR, those things are "tough guys with guns, gorgeous girls and vintage cars."
   It’s not just the cars that are vintage. The men feel like a throwback to another era — or, rather, to the exaggerated masculine ideal of another era. And the women? Well, let’s just say they’d have felt right at home in the noir movies or EC horror comics of the Eisenhower age, except that they wouldn’t have been allowed to parade around in public in those days dressed like models for a Greenwich Village sex shop. This is the sort of noir world where powerful men are invariably corrupt, and tough-but-tender-hearted regular guys are forever putting their lives on the line to defend gagged and writhing women. There’s even a nasty senator (Powers Boothe) who looks like an even more feral version of the 1950s’ Joseph McCarthy.
   Miller’s novels are graphic in both senses of the word: The evil his characters do is industrial-strength. People are nearly always tortured before they’re killed, and they’re tortured in medieval ways, vivisected limb by limb, castrated, even cannibalized. There’s a post-apocalyptic, Rambo-on-steroids feel to it all, as if Miller and his heroes are convinced that any atrocity is justified to punish bad guys. As a result, the only difference between good guys and bad guys is that the good ones torture and kill to avenge or protect a woman while the bad guys do it for fun or profit.
   But this is a comic book, after all. Miller’s heroes have near-superhuman powers, flinging themselves down stairwells or out high windows to land without a scratch and shrugging off grievous injuries ("Just a flesh wound," scoffs one when he’s shot in the arm). And gore just happens to be the medium through which they express themselves best.
   In one of the deftly integrated stories, Dwight (Owen), a character so stripped down there’s nothing left but his unflappable cool, both avenges his annoying cocktail waitress girlfriend (the perpetually mugging Brittany Murphy) and defends his true love, the queen of the ferocious Old Town hookers (Rosario Dawson) by dispatching with a psychotic cop (del Toro). "Stay cool," Dwight tells himself, in a speech that pretty much sums up the movie. "It’s time to prove to your friends that you’re worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying, sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people."
Rated R. Contains sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content, including dialogue.