Sin City: Hollywood Grows Some Balls

Frank Miller’s Sin City is a film you don’t often see out of Hollywood: a completely uncompromising execution of raw, unhinged brutality. Bringing serious style to the comic book movie genre and raising it to an art form, Robert Rodriguez’s take on the graphic novel is one of the best films of 2005.

Sin City is composed of three separate, yet interlocking stories taking place in the fictional Basin City. One involves a troglodyte of a hood (Mickey Rourke) tracking down the ones who killed his one and only love. Another sees a street battle precipitated by a nice-guy murderer (Clive Owen) who’s struggling to set things right with two warring factions. And the third follows the plight of an ex-cop (Bruce Willis) who’s trying to save a girl from the clutches of the same scumbag who had abducted her years before. Like three giant building blocks, these tales abut each other over the rainy streets of Sin City.

The most striking feature of Sin City is its visual representation. Constructed entirely with computers from the ground up, the city is a spot-on picture of Frank Miller’s dark vision. Spattered explosions of vivid color adorn the dismal blacks and grays, under the unrelenting deluge of rain that dogs the characters. Blood is a stark white against the obsidian black, and there’s a lot of it. Sin City is truly a comic book page come to life.

Accompanying the eye-candy is no-restraint violence, and it is glorious. Normally one should shun violence, but Sin City is such a guilty pleasure that even the most mild-mannered viewer can start to salivate. Watching Rourke shove an unfortunate hit man’s head through a brick wall or Willis tear off a criminal’s testicles is a new height in film mayhem. But it all adds up to the substance of Sin City. These are career criminals in a fantasy world where brutality and a lack of conscience reign supreme. This is a noir that they couldn’t show back in the 1940s, with all the hallmark gruff narratives and hard lighting through cigarette smoke.