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Sin City

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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“After a while I’m only punching wet chunks of bone into the floorboards, so I stop.”

That’s just a snippet of the narration provided by one of the “heroes” in Sin City, an effects-heavy orgy of violence and sensuality based on Frank Miller lurid comic book. The narrator tells us this after we’ve watched him beat a man senseless, and eventually beat him face-less … just about head-less, in fact.

But the lines captures the nature of the whole film.

Here’s how you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys in this Robert Rodriguez movie: Villains in Sin City take pleasure in hateful violence of appallingly graphic and extreme proportions. And the heroes? They take pleasure in hateful violence with the added aspect that they’re doing it to protect somebody. But let’s face it — that doesn’t change the fact that they’re taking pleasure in the destruction of life, and that their elaborately bloody executions are presented with maximum cool in order to give us pleasure at the same time.

This isn’t like Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where the violence is presented as absurdity and the performers as utter buffoons whose crimes show them to be severely naïve and contradictory. This is all manner of things that should dismay us wrapped up in a package to present it as utterly and compellingly cool. Tarantino, who directed one of these sequences, could have invested something meaningful into this otherwise bankrupt project, but he does damage to his own integrity instead.

Thus, Sin City is truly destructive, its graphic content almost entirely gratuitous. These artists were clearly eager to blaze new trails for animation and desktop-computer moviemaking. And what did they do with the opportunity? They designed something that throws fuel on the destructive appetites of adolescents, both young and old.

Sure, some of the characters are putting their lives on the line to protect the innocent, but their virtue is not going to inspire anyone. The film obviously focuses on cheap thrills for the majority of its screen time, and it wastes the formidable talents of actors who should know better — Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, and others.

It doesn’t matter how fantastic your frosting might be — if you spread it over a cake laced with poison, it’s still a poisonous cake. Sin City is a “gateway drug” for pornography and hyperviolent entertainment, sure to be rented and relished by young moviegoers everywhere, encouraging them more toward recklessness than responsibility.

The immature minds that invented it should be sent to detention and grounded from the big screen for a few years to come. Alas, they’re being praised for breaking new ground, and we can expect plenty more of the same, setting the bar lower and lower, encouraging the audience to become more and more permissive of the lewd and the lurid.

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Director – Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez.

Writer – Frank Miller, based on his series of “Sin City” graphic novels.

Director of photography – Robert Rodriguez

Editor – Robert Rodriguez

Music by Robert Rodriguez, John Debney and Graeme Revell

Producers – Elizabeth Avellán, Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Miller

Dimension Films. 126 minutes. Rated R.

STARRING: Jessica Alba (Nancy), Devon Aoki (Miho), Alexis Bledel (Becky), Powers Boothe (Senator Roark), Rosario Dawson (Gail), Benicio Del Toro (Jackie Boy), Michael Clarke Duncan (Manute), Carla Gugino (Lucille), Josh Hartnett (The Man), Rutger Hauer (Cardinal Roark), Jaime King (Goldie/Wendy), Michael Madsen (Bob), Brittany Murphy (Shellie), Clive Owen (Dwight), Mickey Rourke (Marv), Nick Stahl (Roark Jr./Yellow Bastard), Bruce Willis (Hartigan) and Elijah Wood (Kevin).

Tags: Literature

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.