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Sin City Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue) Theater release: April 01, 2005 by Dimension Films Directed by: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller Runtime: 2 hours 6 minutes Cast: Mickey Rourke (Marv), Bruce Willis (John Hartigan), Benicio Del Toro (Jack Rafferty), Clive Owen (Dwight), Elijah Wood (Kevin), Jessica Alba (Nancy Callahan) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Between the Spy Kids and El Mariachi franchises—to say nothing of his work on the original From Dusk Till Dawn—Robert Rodriguez has been making live-action cartoons for so long, it was probably only a matter of time before he made a live-action comic book.

Bruce Willis as Hartigan

Sin City is based on a series of graphic novels (from Dark Horse Comics) written and drawn by Frank Miller, and it is difficult to imagine a director better suited to Miller's pulpy, anarchistic style than Rodriguez. Miller may work on more mainstream titles from time to time—recent comic-book movies like Elektra (based on a character created by Miller) and the upcoming Batman Begins (inspired, in part, by Miller's classic Batman: Year One storyline) definitely bear his imprint—but the independently produced Sin City arguably captures Miller's sleazy, sadomasochistic cynicism in its purest form. There is a wildness, a craziness, to Miller's stories that bleeds—no, sprays—off the page, and whatever else we might say about this film, Rodriguez does capture that element very well.

Although this movie makes good use of the sax-heavy music and world-weary narration that are common in film noir, Rodriguez's mostly black-and-white visuals are influenced more by Miller's original comics than by any cinematic conventions. The blood—and there is a lot of blood here—is given the red spot-color treatment on some occasions, while on others it looks like bird droppings, a patch of white against someone's black coat. In at least one scene, someone stands against a brick wall and, in the shadow, we see not simply a darker version of the rest of the wall, but more of a reverse image—dark bricks with white lines between them. And the city itself looks like a monochromatic variation on those all-digital sets we saw a few months ago in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Clive Owen as Dwight and Benicio Del Toro as Jackie-Boy

But there is one crucial way in which Sin City, the film, is not like Sin City, the comics. Each of the original stories was meant to be digested on its own, but the film strings several of them together, and the cumulative effect of sitting through so many grim, morbid, hyperviolent tales is numbing to the soul. You can only introduce, and then bump off, so many protagonists before it gets a bit wearying. And that's before we take into account the sheer repetition of all the dismemberings, beheadings, and wounds to the male groin.

Some actors fit very well into this milieu, others less so. Mickey Rourke, of all people, is the stand-out as Marv, the ugly brute who is framed for the murder of a hooker named Goldie (Jaime King) who gave herself to him for free; he then tortures and kills as many people as it takes to avenge her death. I was startled and worried for Rourke when I saw the remake of Get Carter five years ago—it looked like he had taken enough steroids to kill a stable full of horses—but in this film, he's one of the few actors who wears prosthetics on his face, and the added bit of freakishness actually helps to make him more sympathetic and human.

Bruce Willis is also quite good as John Hartigan, who may be the only good cop in town, and whose stoic, years-long efforts to defend the life and honor of an 11-year-old girl are not repaid in quite the way he expected. After violently saving young Nancy (Makenzie Vega) from a pedophile (Nick Stahl) whose father just happens to be a powerful senator, Hartigan is hospitalized and sent to prison on trumped-up charges, all because he won't reveal where Nancy is. His wife abandons him, but Nancy writes him every week, for years. And then, one day, Hartigan's prison sentence ends, and so he goes looking for Nancy—only to find that she has become a stripper played by Jessica Alba, and she's in love with him.

Jaime King as Goldie

Sin City is very much an exercise in male fears and fantasies. All of the voice-over narration is provided by men like Marv and Hartigan—it is their heads we get inside—while the women tend to be something "other." More often than not, the female characters are there because they need protection, though there is at least one major exception. In one story, Clive Owen plays Dwight, a guy who sets out to protect his new girlfriend, Shellie (Brittany Murphy), from an abusive ex-boyfriend (Benicio Del Toro), and somehow, along the way, he gets drawn into an all-out war between the mob and a gang of heavily-armed prostitutes. But of course, the sight of skimpily-dressed streetwalkers brandishing swords and machine guns is meant more as a turn-on for men than an expression of female empowerment; the point of all this is how Dwight's affections turn from the tremulous Shellie to Gail (Rosario Dawson), the psycho prostitute that Dwight calls his "warrior woman," his "valkyrie."

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