Sin City [2005] - Buena Vista Home Entertainment

FASCINATING

Wow! What a tour-de-force! Very stylistic and very well done! An excellent comic book adaption that couldn't have been made any better. Easily Rodriguez' best film so far.

enjoyable comic book fluff

return to form for robert rodreiguez after the awful spy kids trilogy and the even worser once upon a time in mexico,this also offers a return to form for mickey roark who shines in this movie.

Gloriously grim, but not perfect.

This film has its problems, but it has some pretty brilliant aspects too...

The mix of eras in the styles (sometimes seems like a contemporary setting, sometimes dystopian future, all mixed with a 50's feel) help give this film a timeless quality. Show it in 40 years time and it won't have dated.

The men are all tough-guys, and the women are mainly prostitutes - but they aren't subservient. It's the women where the power ultimately lies.

The film looks great with the digitally created backgrounds. It's not as visually impressive as `Casshern' (where all the backgrounds were created digitally) but it isn't meant to be - the backgrounds are bleak and gritty, they portray the depression of a City gone to social ruin.

A lot of work has gone into giving the characters depth. The narrative is straight from them, we are able to see the city through their eyes, we hear their thoughts, we begin to understand their philosophy. This really worked for Hartigan (Bruce Willis), his story was compelling and poignant. But for the others - they were interesting to watch, but I felt little for the characters involved.

In a nutshell: the interweaving of several stories a-la `Pulp Fiction' isn't as seamless as it could be, it feels a bit disjointed but it does show how everyone is caught up in the web of corruption which binds the city together. The message and the direction are handled well; overly stylistic films can sometimes flop - but in this case it works, and is perhaps the only way to pull off a translation from graphic novel to film. I can't help but think that the film took too much on, although it looks fantastic on screen - I couldn't absorb myself in all the stories. The characters involved seemed too shallow to really care about.

I'd give this 3.5 stars, but I can't. I'm dithering between 3 and 4 stars, but the creative energy which has gone into this film has tipped the balance to a four.

A Modern Masterpiece?

What is most surprising is how many reviewers have missed the point of the film; decrying its violence, depiction of the female characters and even the narrative. Firstly, I am no fan of graphic novels, nor even Robert Rodriguez (Dusk Till Dawn is nothing more than slightly enjoyable popcorm trash) but Sin City is a highly inventive and original film which excellently creates a darkly dystopian world, a thorough inversion of the American dream; where religion and authority are inherently corrupt, where murderers are both heroes and villains and where whores can be angels. Make no mistake, it is an unflincingly violent film. However, very little of it is graphic - Rodriguez opts for a highly stylised depiction of violence - much like the showdown in the house of the blue leaves in Kill Bill - the violence is hyper-real, it's so frequent and extreme to make it unreal, unbelieveable - and this is the point. This is not to say that we become desensitised to it, it's that it's never meant to be real and genuine. The digitalised backgrounds utilised by the director to create the mise-en-scene of a graphic novel serve to reinforce this and the cinematography excellently exploits the film noir conventions whilst making it inherently modern and visceral. Moreover, the film is more than a disjointed montage of loosely connected stories and blunt action. The film deals with serious issues of the nature of evil and corruption, justice and morality, love and revenge - the characters act rather than talk and discuss (the verbose hencemen of Rourke are a superb example of over-intellectualisation). Yes the female characters are uniformly whores, strippers or victims - but Miller and Rodriguez imbue them with a sense of rightuousness and power - they lack the weaknesses that undermine many of the male characters - though Rourke, Willis and even Clive Owen all make excellent noirish anti-heroes. Essentially, yes, it is an action film, but like the work of Tarantino and even, dare I say Kurosawa, the action and violence is highly stylised. The characters, sympathetic and unsympathetic, cliched and original by turns are nevertheless engaging and intricate, prompting more questions than answers. Surely, this is what good film noir is meant to do, and rarely have directors in the modern era been able to evoke this quite so effectively whilst also making it new and modern - a good example of schema plus variation resulting in an original film which is always going to divide audiences.

Partially Excellent

The whole being greater than the sum of the parts, it was a good film. Running the risk of sounding controversial, I remain uncertain as to the benefit of the colour scheming. It worked in some places (ninja-cannibal and orange man), but not in others (luminous elastoplast).

I also find the Mickey Spillane/ Mike Hammer approach to narration and dialogue excruciating, so given that this was the style the film chose to use I had to give up watching it part-way through and come back another day when I was in a better mood.

Nevertheless, elements of the story(s) were brilliantly done; I enjoyed the silent ninja-cannibal entity, and the balances created between the characters, from the impossible-to-knock-down muscle man to Bruce Willis' ailing and vulnerable cop.

And I enjoyed the the ladies costumes, of course.

A good helping of comic book action in the new steam-punk genre.