“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
It’s easy to see how Sin City earned its R rating. It’s a hell of a film—dark, violent, graphic, so hard-boiled it could crack concrete. It’s also one of the most visually accomplished comic-book adaptations ever made.
Let’s get one thing clear right off: this Sin City ain’t Las Vegas. Oh, there’s plenty of vice in Vegas, but Basin City—well, Basin City is something else altogether. It’s a place of crumbling tenements and rain-slicked streets where daylight is as rare as an honest politician. It’s a place where the people live in cheap smoke-filled taverns, one-room flophouses and seedy backrooms. It’s a place of broken dreams, broken hearts and broken noses. It’s a place where everything and everyone is for sale, and the only ones more corrupt than the crooks are the cops. And the good guys? Well, they’re just a little less bad than the bad guys.
In other words, it’s the iconic city of film noir. Originally mapped out in short stories and novels by writers like Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it’s been depicted in a few dozen classic films, ripped off in countless not-so-classic ones, and wholeheartedly appropriated by writer/graphic novelist Frank Miller.
Miller, a comic-book veteran whose grim, noirish Dark Knight series took the Batman character into hard-boiled territory, gets a co-director credit on this film—and rightfully so, because many of the shots are lifted directly from Miller’s Sin City graphic novels. Which is a good thing, because it’s doubtful a director as uninteresting as Robert Rodriguez could have pulled this off by himself. Rodriguez is an obvious devotee of the Tarantino school of pulp-inspired ultra-violence, but until now he’s never shown that he has anything to offer beyond cartoonish gunplay or the kid-friendly action of the Spy Kids movies. With Miller’s storyboards as a template, Rodriguez almost perfectly recreates the stylized film-negative look and gritty atmosphere of the graphic novels.
The film is roughly divided into three major stories: a hulking ex-con named Marv (an astonishing Mickey Rourke) goes on a vengeance-fuelled mission to find out who framed him and killed the hooker he loved; an aging detective (Bruce Willis) tries to find a serial child killer before he claims his fourth victim; and a guy who has come back to town to start a new life (Clive Owen) gets into big trouble after he trails his girlfriend’s abusive ex (Benicio Del Toro) into a part of town run by a gang of prostitutes.
Continuing the grand tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction, Miller and Rodriguez populate the film with a bunch of mugs as ugly as the dames are gorgeous. Facial scars and physical deformities abound; Marv’s face is a remarkable landscape of bandages, bloody wounds, deep lines and a chin that looks as though it’s been carved from a granite block. As for the women, I could never top Raymond Chandler in describing former Dark Angel star Jessica Alba: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
But the aspect of the film’s atmosphere that makes it so much stronger than supposedly dark predecessors (like the first Batman film) is its sexually charged violence. Miller descends from the Mickey Spillane line of writers who upped the ante in their detective-heroes’ brutality and ruthlessness; two of the film’s nominal heroes are borderline psychotics for whom killing is often an enjoyable pastime. (”I love hitmen,” muses one character. “No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.”) It’s not for everyone—and some of the more extreme scenes are truly stomach-turning—but to criticize this film for being too violent is to miss the point entirely. In a review of Hammett, Dorothy Parker called his hard-boiled style “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.” She got the point.
(3.5/4)