directors
Frank Miller
Robert Rodriguez
Quentin Tarantino
based on
the graphic novels by
Frank Miller
producer
Elizabeth Avellan
cinematographer
Robert Rodriguez
music
John Debney
Graeme Revell
Robert Rodriguez
editor
Robert Rodriguez
cast
Jessica Alba (Nancy Callahan)
Devon Aoki (Miho)
Alexis Bledel (Becky)
Powers Boothe (Senator Roark)
Rosario Dawson (Gail)
Benicio Del Toro (Jack Rafferty)
Michael Clarke Duncan (Manute)
Carla Gugino (Lucille)
Josh Hartnett (The Salesman)
Rutger Hauer (Cardinal Roark)
Jaime King (Goldie/Wendy)
Michael Madsen (Bob)
Frank Miller (Priest)
Brittany Murphy (Shellie)
Clive Owen (Dwight)
Mickey Rourke (Marv)
Marley Shelton (The Customer)
Nick Stahl (Junior/Yellow Bastard)
Bruce Willis (John Hartigan)
Elijah Wood (Kevin)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 126m
u.s.
release: 4/1/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other robert
rodriguez films
reviewed on this website:
- desperado
- the
faculty
- four
rooms ("misbehavers"
segment)
- from
dusk till dawn (short review)
- once
upon a time in mexico
- spy
kids
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The man is a sap -- a rumpled
Galahad, willing to throw it all over for a dame. He knows this,
but it doesn't stop him. He takes on the whole rotten world,
or, at least, the world he knows -- the city and all its crawling
demons, the low-level thugs and the high-level cops, politicians
and clergy who set them in motion. In the electrifying Sin
City, a triptych of film noir taken directly
from a series of graphic novels written and drawn by Frank Miller,
there are three such men. They are different men -- honest cop
John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), hulking bruiser Marv (Mickey Rourke),
and smooth criminal Dwight (Clive Owen) -- but in essence, they're
the same man.
Miller's stories take some
getting used to. After making tons of money for the major comics
companies -- Marvel with Daredevil, DC with Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns -- Miller was ready for a project
closer to his heart, an unabashed tribute to hard-boiled crime
fiction. The Sin City books -- there are seven in all
-- are drenched in Miller's love of the genre, and the movie
version, brought to life by Robert Rodriguez (who co-directed
with Miller), is head over heels in love with Miller's vision.
The look of the film quotes extensively from Miller's chiaroscuro
drawings, with bits of color strategically disrupting the pristine
black-and-white gloom. Remember how you used to copy the Sunday
funnies by pressing a glob of Silly Putty onto the page? Rodriguez'
Sin City is a giant piece of cinematic Silly Putty, and
it's just as fun (and elastic) as that sounds.
After a brief prologue involving
a slick Josh Hartnett encountering a red-draped Marley Shelton
(this was the footage Rodriguez used to sell a wary Miller on
his concept for the movie), we get a few minutes of "That
Yellow Bastard," wherein aging cop Hartigan seems to be
thwarted in his attempt to save an 11-year-old girl from the
degenerate scion (Nick Stahl) of a senator. We leave Hartigan
for a while, and take up the story of Marv, "The Hard Goodbye,"
in which the big lug obsessively tracks down the murderer of
a hooker (Jaime King) who, despite his saucepan mug, gave him
a memorable night in a heart-shaped bed. The tale proceeds and
ends quite noir-ishly, with a pit stop in the realm of
horror, as Marv faces off against a silent cannibal (Elijah Wood,
as un-Frodo as he can get).
The handsomer but no less hard-bitten
Dwight stars in the next story, "The Big Fat Kill,"
in which someone dies who isn't supposed to, threatening the
delicate truce between the denizens of Oldtown (a section of
Sin City owned and operated by armed-to-the-teeth hookers led
by a feral Rosario Dawson) and the police. From there we segue
back to "That Yellow Bastard," wherein Hartigan rises
from the almost-dead to protect the now-grown girl, Nancy Callahan
(Jessica Alba), from the genetically twisted remix of the sick
freak he thought he'd killed.
Everyone involved in Sin
City not only understands this lurid universe but has a grand
time playing in it. They're fully committed to speaking Miller's
sometimes stilted crime-novel dialogue; it's the language of
blood, revenge, desperation. Of all the actors -- including Rutger
Hauer in a tiny but creepy turn as a despicable cardinal -- Mickey
Rourke most viscerally gets the soul of noir. His Marv
is a tough-guy sentimentalist who has certain guidelines -- "I
don't hurt girls" -- but takes to brawling and torture like
a natural-born psycho, all the while popping pills meant to keep
him from getting "confused." Rourke submerges himself
in this shambling mass of violence without a hint of ego; his
comeback deserves to begin here.
Sin City is a gleaming pop revelation, a completely
realized vision in a way that the similar but sadly uninvolving
Sky
Captain and the World of Tomorrow wasn't. (It'll be ideal
for DVD, where the burnished visuals can tickle your eyeballs
over and over.) Robert Rodriguez is a lifelong comics geek and
tireless DIY digital filmmaker, and Sin City is what he's
been getting at all these years. His sense of play is inseparable
from Miller's; the books have the charming feel of a guy doodling
stories that excite him, and so does the movie. Miller loves
gun-toting, sword-swinging women, and Sin City gives him
the silent, deadly Miho (Devon Aoki) to conjure with -- she's
the mirror image of the wordless cannibal, and she could easily
move from Oldtown into the world of Kill
Bill. (Rodriguez' buddy Quentin Tarantino, the
maestro behind Kill Bill, dropped by the set and
directed a morbidly funny scene between Dwight and a sicko played
over-the-top by Benicio Del Toro.) Sin City doesn't touch
mundane reality for a minute, confining itself to a hermetic
yet teeming universe of knights in trenchcoats, dragons with
badges, and damsels creating distress. As a work of pulp-fiction
devotion, it's the most vital American film in years.
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