Rating of
4/4
Sinfully brilliant!
goodfellamike - wrote on 10/26/08
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City is a smooth, gruesome, ultimately fulfilling celebration of violence that resides within the walls of its genre: graphic creativity. It follows three stories from fairly intellectual viewpoints, and although all the characters in the story inhabit the same place, Basin City, rarely do they intersect.
John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a cop pushing sixty with a heart condition pledges the remainder of his life and career in saving an eleven year old girl from the clutches of a vile pedophile (Nick Stahl) who happens to be the son of the city’s most notorious and powerful senator (Powers Booth); Marv (Mickey Rourke), a hulking, brooding convict finds himself the fall guy in the murder of a prostitute he’s infatuated with and undergoes his own method of investigation that involves torture, all-out gore and redemption; Dwight (Clive Owen), a drifter who has had plastic surgery to conceal his identity has returned to Basin City and finds himself involved with a waitress (Brittany Murphy) who’s current boyfriend (Benecio Del Toro) is the cause of many problems before and following his demise. Added to these elements are a large group of prostitutes, one of which makes her way through life using swords to decapitate undesirables, a hit man who uses calm words before he strikes, a corrupt church official, an otherworldly sort who eats the flesh and souls of his victims, a yellow "bastard" with a stench like no other, a group of mercenaries, the mob, and countless cohorts who appear to never have attended church growing up. Just about everyone in Sin City has murdered, been murdered, been involved in murder, or is conspiring to commit murder. Sin City is a place of sorrow, blood and of course, sin.
Robert Rodriguez has taken writer Frank Miller’s graphic novels to heart. He has transposed them to a different medium without losing the atmophere, tone or lurid subject matter. He gives his characters a life of their own in a timeless world where everyone smokes cigarettes, drives a fast car and can get shot fifty times without dying. If the film has a flaw, it’s certain cheesy lines of dialogue and a couple of the performers going out of step; Michael Madsen suffers the most in an underwritten role and Benecio Del Toro is an unappealing character, but apparently for no reason. The standout performance is given by Mickey Rourke, who, with a face that a mother couldn’t love, stampedes his way through the screenplay with the vivid fierceness his talent has shown in the past. He’s a hard-edged, though soft-hearted criminal who doesn’t mind murdering his way to the top of the corruption ladder to avenge his beloved Goldie. His character just happens to receive the best lines in the screenplay as well. Other cast members are memorable: Clive Owen does well as the sinister Dwight, caught in situations he asks for; Rosario Dawson is blood-curdling as the leader of the prostitutes who thoroughly enjoys the chaos; Bruce Willis is solid as the cop with angina whose love for a little girl is his own fate; Nick Stahl is cruel, but intense as a psychopathic child molester who bleeds hate and Elijah Wood is perfectly menacing in a character that makes absolutely no noise at all.
Sin City is a triumph because of the collective effort of the technical aspects and the well-defined characters. It creates its own mysteries, solves its own dilemmas and calculates its moves all by its own rules. We are viewing a world that doesn’t exist, so we don’t question how someone can take ten bullets to the chest and go on kicking, or wonder how someone can jump off a building ledge and land on his feet. It’s sensational, adult entertainment, much reminiscent of Pulp Fiction, that stands high in the mind more than any film so far of 2005. Final Grade: A
