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Frank Miller's Sin City

2005, Movie, R, 124 mins

Frank Miller's Sin City: Review

FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY
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Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels read as though the writer/illustrator fell into a hard-boiled vat of distilled Mickey Spillane, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler and surfaced with eau de pulp oozing from his pores, and this ferociously faithful adaptation is the closest live-action filmmaking (extensively aided by CGI) has ever come to reproducing the visual aesthetic of comic-book art. Robert Rodriguez, who codirected with Miller, doesn't so much duplicate Miller's uncompromising black-and-white images spattered with gouts of primary color as cross them with the glistening grays of film noir and set them to a score that kicks off with a pulsating homage to Henry Mancini's "Theme from Peter Gunn." The film opens with the vignette Rodriguez shot to convince Miller that Sin City could be filmed, in which a soulful hit man (Josh Hartnett) meets a fugitive dame (Marley Shelton) in a glittering red dress, then launches into the story of world-weary, middle-aged Basin City Detective Hartigan (Bruce Willis). On the verge of retirement, he saves 11-year-old Nancy Callahan (Makenzie Vega) from perverted rich boy Roark Jr. (Nick Stahl), the son of powerful Senator Roark (Powers Boothe), and works over Junior for good measure. The price of bucking a system firmly in thrall to the corrupt Roark family: Hartigan finds himself on trial for assault and child molestation. As Hartigan is getting ground up in the wheels of injustice, hulking bad man Marv (Mickey Rourke, his face prostheticized into a cross between Jack Palance and an Easter Island monolith) has a date with an angel. Actually, she's a hooker named Goldie (Jaime King), but when she's killed and Marv is framed for her murder, he sets out on a single-minded rampage that leads to a freakish serial killer (Elijah Wood), corrupt Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer) and Goldie's twin sister. Elsewhere, stone-cold killer Dwight (Clive Owen) comes home with a new face plastered over the same old bad attitude, and inadvertently sets in motion a chain of events that could lead to gang war in Old Town, where gun-toting hookers run the show. Finally, the battered, eight-years-older Hartigan, 19-year-old stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba) and the vengeful, mustard-yellow monster that was once Rourk Jr. have their final showdown. The downside to fidelity to the graphic novels is that the stories are a hash of warmed-over genre clichés. But once you're good and drunk on the look, details like the tin-eared tough-guy dialogue (which sounds especially stilted issuing from flesh-and-blood mouths) don't seem so important. Quentin Tarantino fans take note: The "Special Guest Director" was responsible for a single scene involving Dwight and a chatty dead guy (Benicio Del Toro). leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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