Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Year: 2005
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
When my Cuban grandmother really enjoyed a movie, like The Sound of Music or Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book, she used to say that it was “lilting,” which means cheerful or buoyant. She pronounced it like this: “LEEL-ting.” For me, Sin City is “LEEL-ting.”
The writing in Sin City makes hardboiled detective fiction writer Mickey Spillane look subtle. It’s an adolescent fever dream of brutish angels watching over legions of anatomically luscious, scantily clad women, protecting them from the perverts who want to hurt them in the most grotesque ways imaginable. This is a world in which torture, cannibalism, and dismemberment seem to be everyday occurrences. In other words, a bank holiday for guys like me.
The dialog in Sin City is like a Platonic ideal of hardboiled patter. It’s so over the top, it’s frequently funny, but you’ll never catch the actors winking at you. The writer and director do the heavy lifting, which is as it should be.
Sin City is comprised of a half dozen interlocking short stories, and each episode is more entertaining than the last, although I’ll have to say that the Marv sequence is my favorite. In that one, Mickey Roarke tracks down the killer of Goldie, who favored him with one night of connubial bliss before making her trip to the Big Nowhere.
There are plenty of comic books being made into movies these days, but Sin City is the first movie to be made into a comic book. No joke, Sin City literally looks like a comic book come to life. Director Robert Rodriguez uses digital filmmaking and green screens to create a look ripped from comic book panels. For me, Sin City is even better than the Frank Miller comics it’s based on. (I know that’s heresy, but what the hey.) Since Rodriguez has been incredibly faithful to Miller’s graphic novels, he’s generously given Miller co-directing credit.
And what a cast Rodriguez has assembled: Mickey Rourke (doing some of his finest work ever as Marv); Bruce Willis as cop with a heart of mush Hartigan and Michael Madsen as his partner Bob; Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer, and Nick Stahl as three generations of the bottomlessly corrupt Roark family; Michael Clarke Duncan as a mobster; Benicio Del Toro as psycho Jackie Boy; Elijah Wood, who is one epically sick puppy; and Clive Owen as Dwight, yet another tarnished knight in shining armor. And I haven’t gotten started on the women in the cast, who constitute a who’s who of female pulchritude: Jessica Alba, Devon Aoki, Rosario Dawson, and Brittany Murphy are especially drool-worthy.
For me, there are not enough superlatives to cover Sin City. Rodriguez hits it out of the park. This is his best movie yet, even including his segment from Grindhouse, which was a blast.
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