Film Review: Sin City (2005)

This is the sort of film that you don't so much watch as look at. And that's the problem. It's a visual stunner, and extremely gory, with plenty of nudity, but it's as if all of these tricks are intended to distract us from noticing that there's nothing much to this thing. This is a comic book turned film that has gone from being two-dimensional to being more two-dimensional.

Quentin Tarantino has said that the Sin City comic books are impressive for their rich "mythology", but that isn't evident in the movie. What the movie consists of is stock characters speaking corny lines that we've heard a million times before in scenarios that leave no mystery as to where they're headed. No doubt some witless critic will say this is all "like Mickey Spillane on drugs", but it's more like Mickey Spillane phoning it in. The real selling point for the movie is that it's "faithful to its subject matter". Robert Rodriguez has bragged that he shot the comic books as if they were storyboards- but is this something a director should brag about? That he made no real artistic choices? And are comic books supposed to be a higher art form than films? I can see how these stories might play in a comic book as a wry commentary on stock noir characters and situations- but here it just plays like stock noir characters and situations.

At any rate, the film consists of three stories about tough guys sticking up for dames. In Tarantino style, the stories are interwoven and track back on themselves. In true Tarantino style, this is supposed to distract us from how disposable and soulless the whole thing is. Sure, the gore is cool, the frequent nudity is cool, everything is cool, cool, cool- but the true target market for this thing is fifteen year old boys who wish that they themselves could stick up for a dame sometime. Frank Miller's idea of nuance is to give his characters crudely "paradoxical" character traits- a priest who kills prostitutes, a young nerd who kills prostitutes, a Senator who's involved with crime, a cop who gets drunk and beats his girlfriend, a hooker with a heart of gold. And so on. Again, all of this would have sounded cool to me when I was in detention back at W.T. Woodson High.

Of course, criticize the thing this way and you seem humorless. Don't you get it? It's supposed to be stupid! What do you want? Bergman? Okay, well fine. I understand it's a fan boy movie- full of endless references to 50s schlock and no visible adult relationships. All the bad guys get castrated, and all the girls walk around topless. Nerd heaven. I can accept all of that. I really can. My real problem with the film was that I understood that it was going to be that way from about five minutes in. After that, there were no surprises. It was like listening to a drunk college kid yammering on at a bar- loud and brash and raunchy, but excruciatingly boring.