PLOT: Three connected tales about life in the gritty and dangerous place called Sin City -- a retiring cop tries to save a child from a pervert, a violent thug hopes to avenge the killing of a pretty prostitute and a guy tries to protect the prostitutes of Old Town, not that they seem to need much protection.
Sin City takes comic book visuals and turns them into feverish moving pictures. This is a very big technical deal involving green screen and digital wizardry of all sorts, and it allows the film to keep the exact noirish look of a pulp graphic novel.
In black and white with bits of vivid colour, Sin City begins with a kiss-kiss/bang-bang vignette and a handsome assassin. Very cool. Stylish. Edgy.
Here we are in Basin City, a place where it's always dark, damp and depressing. And here's an about-to-retire cop with a bum ticker (Bruce Willis) who hopes to save a child from a serial killer before his heart gives out.
Next up, meet Mickey Rourke in plenty of facial prosthetics -- redundant? -- as Marv, a vicious, musclebound thug happy to avenge the killing of the beautiful woman who happens to be dead in his bed. To that end, Marv smashes up stuff, drags a guy alongside his speeding car, punches a dog, butchers a cannibal, removes limbs from one or two people and generally stays busy. The violence is extreme and cartoonish -- initially.
Eventually, it gets sickening.
The story continues with Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro (the latter also done up strange with facial prosthetics) duking it out over one woman and then fighting over an entire community of prostitutes. Sin City is kind of a long story. People are hacked to bits, heads are cut off, other heads get arrows through them, and then, finally, it's full circle and back to that aged copper, Bruce Willis.
The cast of Sin City includes Jessica Alba, Carla Gugino, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Michael Clarke Duncan, Michael Madsen, Josh Hartnett, Jaime King, and Powers Boothe. All that star power isn't enough, however, to keep you from noticing that you are not engaged. Frank Miller's comic-book stories don't translate well to the big screen.
And why should they? It makes perfect sense when you read this sort of dialogue in a bubble over someone's head: "I'm as expert as a palsy victim doing brain surgery with a pipe wrench," but just try saying that out loud.
(And after that, try, "Then it hit me, right in the nuts: What if I'm wrong? You can't kill a man without knowing for sure you ought to." )
Mostly because of the role played by the imagination, some stories that work on paper don't work as movies. Sin City is an interesting experiment, but all it does is turn a graphic novel into a novelty. That wears thin fast.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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