Sin City: 2004, dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. Seen at Galaxy Highland (April 3).
Sin City is a difficult movie to review. I started writing this review on April 4 and you can see how long it took me to finish it.
I can say that it is one of the most visually impressive movies I have seen in recent memory. It captures a comic-book world better than any other film. It is an excellent adaptation.
But does an excellent adaptation equal a good movie?
I get annoyed when I talk about something I don’t like in a movie and someone says, “Well, it was in the book, so it couldn’t be changed.” Sorry, I don’t think that’s an acceptable excuse.
For example, I was not particularly thrilled with the way women were portrayed in Sin City. Sure, some of the women kick ass, but most of them appear to be strictly ornamental. The men are out there avenging this woman’s death or protecting that woman … no matter how strong these women may seem, the implication is that they can’t take care of themselves.
We could argue that the film doesn’t portray men very well either, but I think the tough-guy stereotype is less distasteful than the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotype.
I realize that this may be extremely faithful to Frank Miller’s books, but Robert Rodriguez still made the choice to keep that portrayal in the film and is still answerable for it. (And I don’t want to hear that the portrayal of women was faithful to noir, because I have not seen a classic noir film wherein the women were clad only in fishnet.)
Sin City is also excessively violent. It is inspiring me to write a little rant about MPAA ratings and how inconsistent and ridiculous they can be. This is a movie where you should absolutely take the R rating seriously if you are a parent. It is not a movie for children. (There were children in the theater where we saw it, who stayed for the entire movie. I hope they had less disturbing dreams than I did that night.)
The violence is unreal and over-the-top but that doesn’t mean it isn’t intense. Just because the blood is yellow or white instead of red doesn’t mean that you might not want to hide your eyes when someone rips off or shoots off someone else’s body part, which happens throughout the film with a variety of extremeties.
The acting seems stilted overall, but I think that’s appropriate for this particular movie. Mickey Roarke, although unrecognizable, stands out as Marv, the big guy who decides to wreak vengeance upon the killers of a woman he once loved. Clive Owen is also good. Elijah Wood is reeeeeally creepy. Bruce Willis is fine, but he looks like Bruce Willis, which is a little disconcerting in a film where nearly everyone else looks like they’ve been created just for that particular universe. (It took me a minute to recognize Benecio Del Toro.) The actresses do what they can with the roles they have.
Quentin Tarantino is billed as a “guest director”—he filmed one scene in the movie as part of a bet he had with Robert Rodriguez. I tried to guess which scene it was and it turned out I guessed wrong. (It’s the scene with Dwight and Jackie Boy in the car.) I couldn’t tell, although I’ve heard some people say it has the best performances in the movie.
My boyfriend pondered whether this is one of those films that would fall apart if it were not for the big gimmick behind it, the gimmick in this case being the startlingly original way in which it was filmed. It does look more like a comic book than any comic book adaptation I have ever seen.
If this film were made in color, or in standard black-and-white, would the storyline still be interesting? Would we have been absorbed in the the film in the same way?
I don’t know. It’s hard for me to answer that kind of question (he asked the same thing about Memento) because the fact is that the film does have that gimmick, that the way the film is shot is inherently part of what makes the film work. And the film does work, in the sense that I was drawn into it and found it fascinating.
But did I like it? Not particularly. There are murmurings of a rumored sequel, and I hope that Robert Rodriguez finds something else to do instead.
Sin City is a fascinating curiosity, possibly of greater interest to people who have read Frank Miller’s books, and not for the squeamish. Ultimately, however, it is not as memorable as it appears to be while you are watching it. There. That’s my review.