Sin City

Reviewed by Rich Drees

     Basin City is a town overrun with vice and corruption, from its highest offices to its grimiest back alleys. It’s a town where all the men wear trench coats that seem to billow just right in the wind. It’s a place where the hoods have scarred faces, bent noses and names like Klump and Schlubb. It’s a place where turning your back on the wrong person could earn you a bullet. But Basin City is probably better known to its denizens by its nickname- Sin City.

     Sin City is a town of many stories. There’s Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a cop on the verge of retirement who not only tracks down a missing 11-year-old girl, but also discovers just how far he is willing to go to protect her from the more depraved elements of Basin City. Marv (Mickey Rourke) is an ugly ex-con framed for the murder of Goldie (Jaime King), the only woman who ever showed him a night’s worth of tenderness. While trying to protect his girlfriend Shellie (Brittany Murphy), Dwight (Clive Owen) may have just accidentally changed the power structure among the criminal elements in Basin City’s Old Town district.

     The individual stories of Sin City play out in a straightforward fashion, and it is only as the movie unspools that we see how interconnected the stories are. An incidental character in one tale becomes a central figure in another; a key location for one story was briefly visited in a previous tale. The cumulative effect presents Basin City as the main character of the film. It’s a place where the good guys and bad guys aren’t necessarily on the sides of the law you’d expect them to be. But no matter if they are cop or crook, the heroes of Sin City all follow a strong moral code, seeking to mete out their own particular justice to those who have been wronged by the city.

     Unlike Superman (1978) or Spider-Man (2002), comic book adaptations that culled decades worth of material to stitch a screenplay together from disparate story elements, director Robert Rodriguez, along with Frank Miller, the writer/artist of the Sin City series of graphic novels who receives a co-director’s credit here, have faithfully adapted specific Sin City stories. (Quentin Tarantino receives a credit as "Guest Director," having overseen one scene of the film as payment for granting Rodriguez's request to help score Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol.2.)The duo are definitely following in the footsteps of director John Houston who, when asked how his film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novel The Maltese Falcon would succeed when two previous attempts to bring the book to the screen had failed, simply stated that he was going to use the book as the script. But the duo have done more than just translate the books plotlines, characters and dialogue, Rodriguez and Miller have also replicated Miller’s stark and striking graphic design work- black and white with the occasional splash of color. This is a movie that perhaps could only have been made with the use of computers. The end result is not so much a comic book movie but a comic book that moves, a living graphic novel. It is also a movie whose violence is every bit as striking as its cinematic beauty.