Sin City

Starring Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson, Clive Owen and Jessica Alba

Written and directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez

If you look back at Miller’s unparalleled body of comic book work, you’ll see these themes reappear in endless variation. In his legendary latter-day Batman saga The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne is a 60-year old retired crime fighter forced into action when the Gotham City government proves unable to stop the forces of chaos threatening to plunge the city into the Abyss. In his outstanding Daredevil series Love and War, the mob boss Kingpin systematically destroys Matt Murdock’s life, forcing the blind superhero back to the blasted streets of Hell’s Kitchen to be reforged. Both heroes are driven far beyond the limits of human endurance and pushed to the very brink of death and psychic despair, only to emerge triumphant in a world too morally compromised to acknowledge their pyrrhic victory.

Like all great storytellers, however, Miller is able to compose so many interesting variations of his proto-story that we never notice that the melody is essentially the same. In the 1990s, he created the ultimate platform for his themes in Sin City, his collection of hardboiled short stories told in comic book form. The collected tales of Sin City form Miller’s Magnum Opus, the definitive statement of his artistic ideals.

The genius of Robert Rodriguez, the maverick Texas auteur who shoots his films on digital video, edits them, adds the special effects and scores them on a bank of red-hot Power Mac G4s in his garage, lies in his acknowledging that Miller is already a filmmaker. Every black-and-white frame of the Sin City series, which Miller illustrates as well as writes, is already a perfectly composed shot. Rodriguez understood that the only way to do justice to Miller’s work was to simply bring the frames to life.

To adapt Miller for the screen, Rodriguez took three separate Sin City tales, hammered them together anthology-style and centered them on three variations of Miller’s anti-hero. Bruce Willis plays Hartigan, a broken cop with a bad ticker who uncovers the maggot-ridden heart of the city while saving a young stripper (Jessica Alba) from a depraved pedophile named Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl); Mickey Rourke is Marv, a shovel-faced brute who embarks on a roaring rampage of revenge after a hooker winds up murdered in his bed; and Clive Owen is Dwight, a would-be paladin who vows to protect his lover Gail (Rosario Dawson) and the prostitutes of Olde Town from the machinations of dirty cop Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro).

Every review you read of this film will mention its visual impact, and all the superlatives you’ll encounter are accurate. For a sheer visceral, orgasmic eye fuck, you’ll never have better. The images are beautiful, dreadful, repulsive and haunting— sometimes all at once. As in the new Star Wars pictures and the gee-whiz fakery of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, all the actors were filmed in front of green screens and placed into virtual sets. But unlike George Lucas’ digital hand jobs, Sin City goes all the way. It’s a living, breathing organic piece of work, all the more impressive for existing mostly on a hard drive.

The result is indisputably the best cinematic adaptation of Sin City that could have been made. But does the film hold its own as a work of art? It’s a very close call.

If Sin City is Rodriguez’s Pulp Fiction, then in some ways he’s surpassed his buddy and guest director Quentin Tarantino. Remember how shocked and jazzed we all were way back in 1994 with all of the butt sex, heroin use and exploding heads on display in Tarantino’s retro masterpiece? Child’s play. The violence and moral turpitude on display in this picture makes Kill Bill look like Bambi. Guys get their dicks blown off in this picture. Guys get shot, stabbed, disemboweled, beheaded, tortured, electrocuted, pierced with arrows and chopped up with axes. Women are beaten with whips and eaten alive by cannibals. Their heads stuffed and mounted as trophies. Sound like your cup of tea?

Unlike Pulp Fiction, which had as its heart a simple tale of redemption, Sin City is relentlessly bleak. Pulp Fiction stands up to endless repeat viewings because we like hanging out with Tarantino’s gang of reprobates. Even though they’re ruthless gangsters, we’d still like to have a beer with Vincent and Jules. But we don’t like anybody in Sin City. The characters are archetypes and ciphers; none exhibit any identifiable human characteristics. Only Mickey Rourke creates a character that seems to leap beyond the two dimensions of the comic panel. He’s nearly unrecognizable beneath the layers of latex that make up Marv’s bony and scarred exoskeleton, but Rourke’s essence shines through. It’s as if Rourke lived his entire life— the acting, the boxing, the girlfriend-beating, the drinking and the years as a Hollywood train wreck— just to prepare for playing Marv. He’s got my vote for Best Supporting Actor.

But the heroes of Sin City win only by becoming more homicidal and depraved than the villains they fight. Within the context of the world they inhabit, their choices indeed seem justified; codes of honor are duly established and followed to their logical extremes. But in a world where the heroes are indistinguishable in every way from the villains, does it ultimately matter who wins? In The Dark Knight Returns, Miller refashions the Joker as a homicidal maniac who’s not above killing off an entire Boy Scout troop just for kicks. But even at the bitter end, with the Joker’s life in his hands, Batman can’t bring himself to commit murder. If Batman lived in Sin City, he’d go to work on the Joker with, to borrow a line, a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.

So depending on your point of view, Sin City is either a new high or a new low in the burgeoning genre of comic book adaptations. I happen to think it’s both. Some will hail it as a geek masterpiece, while others will decry it is a sign of the Apocalypse. Both sides are right. As for me, I enjoyed nearly all of it. And afterwards, I went home and took a bath.

April 6, 2005
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