Sin City does not ease you into Basin City. It throws you straight into black-and-white streets where everyone seems to be either crooked, doomed or carrying a weapon large enough to solve an argument permanently. Within minutes it is obvious that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller are not trying to make a conventional comic-book film. They are trying to make the comic move.
That commitment is still the first thing you notice. The film is almost entirely monochrome, with flashes of red, yellow and blue used like somebody has attacked the frame with a marker pen. Faces appear from pools of shadow. Rain slices across the screen. Blood can be white, black or suddenly bright depending on what the scene wants. It looks artificial because it is supposed to, and that artificiality becomes part of Basin City’s personality.
Sin City is really three main stories sharing the same rotten patch of ground. Bruce Willis plays Hartigan, an ageing cop trying to protect Nancy Callahan. Mickey Rourke is Marv, a battered mountain of a man looking for whoever killed Goldie. Clive Owen’s Dwight gets dragged into the violent politics of Old Town after a confrontation with Jackie Boy goes very badly indeed.
They overlap without being forced into one giant plot. Characters drift through somebody else’s story, locations reappear and the city gradually feels connected by bad decisions rather than a carefully organised cinematic universe.
Marv walks away with the film
The cast is enormous, but Mickey Rourke is the one we remember first. Buried beneath prosthetics, scars and a face that looks chiselled out of damaged concrete, Marv charges through his section of the film with very little interest in subtle problem-solving. Goldie is dead, somebody did it, and Marv intends to work backwards through Basin City’s criminal population until he finds the answer.
Rourke is funny without turning Marv into a joke. He can be brutal one moment and oddly gentle the next, particularly when the film reminds us that Marv knows exactly how the rest of the city sees him. His story is ugly, violent and probably the strongest of the three because it has the simplest engine.
Elijah Wood is used brilliantly against type as Kevin. There is something deeply wrong about seeing the former Frodo Baggins sitting silently behind those glasses, and Sin City knows it. He barely needs dialogue. The stillness does the work.
Bruce Willis brings a more tired energy to Hartigan. His section has the clearest old-school noir shape, with a cop trying to do one decent thing in a place that seems determined to punish decency. Jessica Alba’s Nancy is central to that story, although the film is far more interested in presenting her as an image than giving her the same rough edges afforded to the men.
Clive Owen gets the most knowingly pulpy material. His Dwight narrates as though every thought has been printed in a speech box above his head, which is basically the point. Benicio del Toro’s Jackie Boy is magnificently unpleasant, and his continued presence after things go wrong gives that section some of the film’s nastiest humour.
Then there is Rosario Dawson commanding Old Town, Brittany Murphy firing off Miller dialogue, Rutger Hauer turning up with exactly the sort of face Basin City requires, plus Carla Gugino, Jaime King, Michael Madsen and Nick Stahl. Quentin Tarantino even drops in to direct part of the Jackie Boy sequence. The film is packed, but the stylisation is so aggressive that nobody feels as though they have wandered in from a more normal production.
The violence is equally committed. Heads come off, limbs break and people absorb damage that would end most films several scenes earlier. Because the blood and bodies are treated graphically rather than realistically, the nastiness has a strange comic-book distance. That does not make Sin City gentle. It simply makes its brutality look as though somebody has ripped open the page rather than the person.
The narration is where viewers may either settle into the film completely or start looking for the exit. Everybody talks like they have been awake for three nights, smoking beneath a broken streetlamp while composing their own obituary. Some of the lines are great. Others tip straight into parody. The film never apologises for either.
That is also the source of its biggest problem. Sin City has so much style that eventually the style can become tiring. One gravelly monologue follows another, misery piles on misery and the separate stories do not all carry the same weight. Marv’s section sets a bar that the rest of the film occasionally struggles to clear.
There is not much warmth here either. Basin City is designed as a place where corruption has soaked into the brickwork, so two hours in its company can feel like a long night. The film wants to be excessive, and excess is exactly what it gives us.
Still, it is difficult to confuse Sin City with anything else from 2005. Plenty of comic-book films borrow panels, poses and costumes. This one tries to preserve the actual texture of Miller’s pages, right down to the impossible shadows and slabs of white cutting through black.
That experiment does not work equally well in every scene, and underneath the visual trickery some of the storytelling is thinner than the presentation suggests. But when Rourke is stomping through Basin City, Willis is staring down one last bad decision or Elijah Wood is sitting there being deeply unsettling without saying a word, the film has a nasty little identity all its own.
Sin City is messy, indulgent and sometimes exhausting, but boring is not one of its problems. – Alex
