Viking Night: Sin City
By Bruce Hall
December 3, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Unfortunately, it also sounds like one. As I said, the film is based on certain material taken from the long running Frank Miller series of the same name. Because of this, several not-entirely-related stories are forced to congeal into one fascinating-but-confusing mass of vengeance, violence and dialogue that sounds lifted from the red ink stained repertoire of a ninth grade remedial fiction class. I consider myself a fan of Miller’s, mainly because of his ability to push the genre to places that it’s never been. But despite his knack for innovation there’s a thread – no, a half inch thick polypropylene rope – of cynicism and nihilistic anger running through his work that doesn’t always do his vision justice.
The film is bookended by a pair of scenes that would seem to have little to do with the rest of the movie. But it begins with a bleak, sexy, tightly written prologue that implies you’re in for an old school noir detective thriller worthy of the ages. A hit man (Josh Hartnett) romances and then murders a beautiful woman (Marley Shelton) on a rain slicked balcony against a stark, digitally rendered skyline. Supposedly, this was the proof of concept footage used to sell the film to Miller, and I can only imagine his delight as he watched his comic literally leap to life from the screen.
And I love it, too. It’s all the parts after that I have trouble accepting.
John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is an aging, hard boiled cop with a heart condition – and he’s on his last assignment before retirement (no, I’m not making that up). He and his partner are on their way to a warehouse to apprehend a psychotic child molester who also happens to be the son of a powerful US Senator named Roark (Powers Boothe). It’s never explained how the police know that Roark Junior (Nick Stahl) and his victim are there, but unfortunately for Hartigan, he’s the only cop not on the take tonight. Things go bad, his partner sells him out, but Hartigan saves the girl anyway, and manages to permanently disfigure Junior in the process. It’s an effective scene that sets up this seedy universe, as well as the rotten people who inhabit it.
Next up is Marv (Mickey Rourke, under a pound of makeup), a career criminal fresh out of the joint who hooks up with a hooker named Goldie. While Marv is asleep, a mysterious prowler (Elijah Wood) murders Goldie, and frames the ex-con for the killing. Now on the run, Marv resolves to uncover the truth behind Goldie’s death, regardless of the cost. It turns out that all of this has something to do with Cardinal Patrick Henry Roark (Rutger Hauer), brother to the Senator and uncle to the child molester. Without ruining the story for you, let’s just say that the Roark family are a generically evil political gang whose extracurricular exploits make the Kennedys look like model citizens.
Surrounding all this is the extended industrial wasteland of Sin City, which is the film’s best and most important character. From the dockyard slums to Cowboy Hooker district (you’ll see what I mean), the town has a cancerous vibe, and it’s impossible to tell whether the city or the people in it are the victim. As I implied earlier, Rodriguez is a technically ingenious filmmaker who’s learned how to make efficient, cost effective use of visual effects to make successful movies. He’s also got a pretty good eye for material. His vision as a fan of Miller’s creation results in a movie that’s worth watching just because nothing else like it exists. That high contrast, occasionally color flecked palette I mentioned earlier is almost hypnotic. I can’t stress enough how watching this movie feels like I’m inside the comic.
Which brings me back to the bad parts. There’s a third subplot involving the aforementioned Cowboy Hookers, and an attempt is made to link the threads together and unite the narrative. Unfortunately, aside from some incidental associations, none of the stories seem to have any real effect on the others, and it makes the whole thing feel confusing and (here comes my favorite word) disjunct. Go ahead and combine that with dialogue mostly taken word for word from the comic, and once you’ve popped your eyes back in their sockets, you’ll realize that the visual effects are the best thing about Sin City. My biggest complaint – and this will be a matter of taste – is that while Miller is very good at writing comic book quality dialogue, his stylistic gifts definitely end there. There are really only two characters in this whole movie – Afflicted Male and Hooker Barbie – and they all sound exactly the same.
Seriously, you could randomly swap lines of dialog between characters and it wouldn’t make any difference who said what, because nothing’s really happening anyway. Almost every critical plot point in the film involves a major character failing to notice an incredibly obvious piece of information sitting right in front of them, and no real motivation is ever established for any of them. They’re character archetypes who behave the way they do because like Jessica Rabbit, that’s they’re drawn written that way. And they live in a place where, like a comic, they are the only things that exist.
That’s okay – Star Wars is kind of like that – but while the film’s visual style is something I never get tired of, I would have favored an attempt to flesh out the source material a bit rather than interpret it so literally.
As it is, there’s not enough of a plot to sustain 124 minutes of action and that’s a disservice to what Rodriguez and Miller accomplished technically. Considering the subject matter, there’s a lot of man’s inhumanity to man in this movie, and a LOT of effort went into making the villains as cartoonishly villainous as possible. But the protagonists are equally bland, and they make such frequently dumb decisions it’s hard to really give a shit who lives and who dies, or why. And like you did with your comics, you chuck it aside when you’re done and somehow it never gets seen again. That’s too bad, because visually, Sin City is a world I WANT to get lost in again and again. I just wish it wasn’t so confusing there.