Pulp Fiction
"Sin City" a wild, intoxicating ride, despite gore galore

In the beginning, there was film noir of the 1940s and '50s, dark, chiaroscuro fables of sex, violence, cars, and moral corruption in urban underbelly locales. Then came graphic novels, particularly the work of Frank Miller, a comic writer who also draws his own books, and whose hit 1986 Batman update, The Dark Knight Returns, gave the comics a significantly noir spin. In the '90s, Miller begat the uber-noir series Sin City, which now comes full-circle in Robert Rodriguez's outrageously stylized movie version.

Sin City is the closest the movies have yet come to the punch-drunk intensity of graphic novel artwork onscreen. With good reason: Rodriguez uses Miller's noir nightmare artwork as his storyboard, recreating it panel-for-panel onscreen, shooting actors against a green screen to which digital backgrounds were added later. Rodriquez follows Miller's compositions so closely, he resigned from the Director's Guild of America when the guild refused to sanction his request to list Miller as co-director on the film. Rodriguez was smart to keep faith with the Creator, whose fans are legion in the comic world; it's the fanboys, not the Guild elders who will make or break Sin City.

The film is everything a fan could desire, shot in gorgeous black-and-white with sudden stains of color: a red spangled dress, cold blue eyes, the piss-yellow skin of a perverted killer, blonde hair on a red heart-shaped bed. Characters are white silhouettes in a black field, or looming shadows on brick walls, camera angles are extreme, cars racing along the road fly into the air like skateboards going over hills. Plotwise, lowlife-infested "Basin City" is a tawdry nightworld of hard-luck tough guys, hot babes, and hardboiled dialogue. Bruce Willis is a veteran cop "pushing 60, with a bum ticker" risking everything to protect a kidnapped girl, who grows up to be pole dancer Jessica Alba. Mickey Rourke (under more make-up than the Elephant Man) plays a plug-ugly ex-con who launches a personal vendetta when the beautiful hooker who was nice to him turns up dead.

Dwight (Clive Owen), a murderer with a pretty new face, goes after Jack (Benicio Del Toro), the loose-cannon ex of his barmaid girlfriend (Brittany Murphy). Dwight chases Jack into the red-light district of Old Town, where "the ladies are the law"—an army of exotic dancers and hookers in fishnet led by pistol-packin' mama Rosario Dawson—where he inadvertently touches off a bloodbath involving the ladies, the corrupt cops, and the mob.

The movie is amok in violence, surreal though it may be. Red blood splatters faces, body parts are hacked off, characters are blown up, beaten up, perforated, mutilated, beheaded, and eaten. Talk about your pulp fiction. It's not nearly as disturbing as the realistic violence in war movies like Downfall or A Very Long Engagement, since no one resembling an actual human being is ever involved. (In fact, Del Toro is pretty damn funny trading wisecracks with Owen after his character's been brutally killed, in a scene helmed by "guest director" Quentin Tarantino.) Still, you feel bludgeoned by the time you stagger out.

It helps to understand comics as archetypal tales of sin and redemption, like troubadour ballads and heroic myths. (Think of all the bloodletting in Homer and Malory.) The men are chivalrous in their fashion, meting out justice in a soiled world. ("I don't hit dames" is the credo they all share—their only credo—although most of them do in fact smack their women for their own protection.) The women are luscious, tough, tender-hearted, and, well, mostly naked. The villains are the power elite; they literally belong to the same family: a corrupt senator, his child-molestor son, a Bluebeard of a serial killer, a flesh-eating cardinal.

It's a fanboy's view of life, and yet there's something seductively primal about these stories that Rodriguez brings to the screen with such rigorous fidelity. The extraordinary visuals are intensely exciting—for awhile. But the decision to break up one story to bracket the other two makes the narrative feel clumsy and overlong, and the thundering brutality of the action becomes so repetitive, it finally robs the film of its vitality. Still, it's worth seeing as an often intoxicating experiment in reinventing film language.

SIN CITY With Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, and Benicio Del Toro. Written by Robert Rodriguez, from the graphic novels of Frank Miller. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and Quentin Tarantino. A Dimension release. Rated R. 126 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, April 7, 2005