‘Sin City’ (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller)

Sin City brought noir back to its pulp-magazine origins, using green-screen CGI technology to exactly recreate the exquisitely etched, near-monochrome ink-splash world of four of comic-book legend Frank Miller’s Sin City stories, all set in the seething dystopian hellhole of the imaginary Basin City. The actors (Bruce Willis et al) are shot and lit by Rodriguez to merge seamlessly into animated panels from Miller’s pages. For anyone who’s ever been a comic-book fan, it’s an exhilarating experience – one that’s much truer to the Pop Art quality of, say, the Marvel or DC superhero comics of the 1960s than any ‘realistic’ adaptation of those has yet achieved. There’s apt usage of Miller’s trademark white-out-of-black effects: white blood, the rectangles of sticking plaster on the rock-like head of doomed thug Marv (Mickey Rourke), the figure of Dwight (Clive Owen) falling as a flat white shape against black tar. Similarly enjoyable are the privileged small details – eyes, a bed, a dress – picked out in colour at key moments. 

Transparently immersed in a graphic-novel vice world, Sin City is able to push its levels of violence – and show nearly all women as lissome, semi-clothed or naked S&M vamps – to a degree you’d never get away with in a realistic-looking movie. The film is a relentless hymn to bloodlust, with a sidebar concern for romantic promises. At the scene of the massacre of bad guys at the end of the fourth story ‘The Big Fat Kill’, wanted murderer Dwight – who has engineered the doom of gangsters trying to take over the prostitute- run Old Town – describes his machine-gun toting former lover thus: “The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter... and so am I.” Marv, the implacable super-tough hunk of ‘The Hard Goodbye’ section, extols the pleasures of torture. It’s comical – in the gallows sense – to see how blatantly Rodriguez takes noir’s position as a site of repressed and undirected desires and opens up the valve. 

As with A History of Violence, there’s a mock-epic quality to the way graphic-novel voiceover description and speech-bubble dialogue is written that also tends to grant further distance from the real world, allowing greater licence. Sin City is fantasy fiction of a kind that caters blatantly to the urges of young males, cashing in on the fact that we remain fond of our adolescent pleasures in later life.

Source: Sight & Sound Feb 2013