MOVIE REVIEW: Frank Miller's Sin City

“A hardtop, with a decent engine. And make sure it’s got a big trunk.”

The character Dwight (Clive Owen) snaps this demand halfway through Frank Miller’s Sin City, preparing for the need to avoid bullets, outrun the police, and carry a whole lot of bodies. What he gets, though, is a tired jalopy with a tiny boot and a near-empty gas tank.

Like that car, Sin City’s protagonists aren’t exactly prizes. They stand up for what they believe in because it’s all they have left. A tightly shot, doggedly-faithful comic book film, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s movie will disgust and bore as many viewers as it excites. It is, however, excellent on two levels: one of adolescent thrills and another of refreshing noir innovation.

That is, it is filled with blood and boobies and shot using the gorgeous black-and-white line drawings of the comic book as a storyboard. The sex is typical Hollywood fare, but the violence, heavy on dismemberment—especially of male genitalia—and decapitation, brings the film dangerously close to NC-17 territory.

What’s truly disturbing, though, is that all three of the film’s antiheroes take a vengeful joy in the grisliness they inflict. It’s enough to make even the fans of the comic books queasy; violence rendered in artful black-and-white line drawings is very different from live-action carnage.

Sin City, like last year’s pretty but boring Sky Captain, was shot entirely with actors against green-screens. Everything else was filled in later by computers; however, Sin City’s black-and-white sets have a gritty realism that the sepia-tinted Sky Captain lacked.

The film makes excellent use of splashes of color to break up the black-and-white, and little things like a woman’s blonde hair, a hooker’s green or blue eyes, and Dwight’s bright red sneakers give eye-catching excitement to each frame. The blood is particularly colorful, and appears in red, chocolate-syrupy black, and even tempera-paint white.

For fans of the cult-hit comic, the movie is a lushly realized dream. The dialogue, plot, and scene composition of every second of the story mirrors the original, and its casting is spot-on. Its structure parallels that of Pulp Fiction, and consists of three full-length story arcs from the comic.

The first of the three stories stars Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a detective forced into early retirement by a heart condition—which his slimy partner, played by Michael Madsen, calls a “bum ticker” in true noir-cheese style. Hartigan has given up his whole life to save a young girl (the adult version of whom is played stiffly by the beautiful Jessica Alba) from the serial-killing son of a powerful senator.

Madsen and Willis are practically typecast into their parts and they disappear into their characters completely.

The second story stars Mickey Rourke as the violent-yet-noble thug Marv. When a beautiful woman (Jamie Pressly) takes him to bed and is murdered during the night, he goes on a rampage to punish those responsible. Marv sadistically tortures and murders at least a half-dozen people to get to Rutger Hauer, the Catholic Cardinal Roark. Marv’s other victims include Elijah Wood, playing a creepily mute cannibal, and Sin City’s creator Frank Miller in a cameo as a priest.

The third tale features the fantastic Clive Owen as Dwight, yet another mentally-addled hero. Dwight is chasing crooked cop Jackie Boy, who is played with gleeful and gravelly-voiced creepiness by Benicio del Toro. Watching the two foils interact—Dwight as the shining protector of women, Jackie-boy as the sinister beater of barmaids—is another of the film’s great interplays. In a wry sequence guest-directed by Quentin Tarantino, the half-decapitated Jackie Boy taunts a hallucinating Dwight.

This third story contains the only watchable female performances. Brittany Murphy is surprisingly effective as Shelley, Dwight’s girlfriend who is menaced by Jackie Boy. The other two women, a dominatrix named Gail (Rosario Dawson) and a spunky hooker played by Gilmore Girls’s Alexis Bledel, overact to the point of high-school-play foolishness. Still, their costumes are some of the best in the film: Dawson manages to look like an Amazon in fishnet bondage gear and Bledel is arresting with her green-tinted eyes and shining white crucifixes hanging from her neck and ears.

Many movies have made violence into art, from the slow-motion bullet ballets of John Woo’s work to the historically poignant impact of Saving Private Ryan. In Sin City, Rodriguez and Miller use a constant stream of savagery to support the movie’s black humor and artful cinematography. Watching the characters “kill their way to the truth” in this film is like pushing Dwight’s car the last half mile of its trip. Cinematic violence can be a high-octane but painfully inefficient fuel, and viewers not thrilled by gore may find their patience breaking down before the trip’s conclusion.

—Staff writer Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at mohammed@fas.harvard.edu.