The Journal

Issue date: 4/7/05 Section: Culture

Media Credit: PHOTO COURTESY DIMENSION FILMS Bruce Willis joins a huge ensemble cast as the venerable badass in the new Robert Rodriguez film "Sin City."

Violence in movies isn't what it used to be. For the last 30 years, movie violence was all about splattering gore. "Sin City" changes the approach to violence in cinema from gut-busting gunshot wounds to axe blows to the crotch.

Super-auteur Robert Rodriguez doesn't take the film noir genre to a new level. "Sin City" sits comfortably in the lore of independent film arrogance.

This hyper-stylized take on a classic filmmaking style charges headlong over the line of taste, and does it with such flamboyance, it's hard not to love every spurting minute of it.

The comic book-turned movie has become its own genre in the last couple of years. While most of the "Sin City's" peers have been flops, this movie embraces its graphic novel roots as it relentlessly beats the audience over the head with its visuals.

Basin City is the film's metropolitan locale, and it is a hellhole. We never see daylight through the eternally raging thunderstorm. Shot in high-definition video, the film is almost entirely in black and white.

Color is painted on reserved objects and characters to highlight what the director finds important, giving the overall look of a comic book ink plate sketch. The style is eye-popping, but doesn't hold up for two hours. Colors are primary and vibrant, but too sparsely used without any method to the madness of coloration.

"Sin City" is based on a graphic novel series by Frank Miller, who also shared the director's chair with Rodriguez. Miller may be the best noir writer of this generation and no hearts and flowers float around this script.

What is floating around, like a turd in the punch bowl of this film's plot, is some awful dialogue. A few memorable one-liners trickle out, but for the most part the actors all mumble in such gritty prose that I was half-expecting the voice track to drop out and speech bubbles to start appearing above Mickey Rourke's head.

"Sin City" is awash in its own style leaving substance to be desired. The story follows three loosely connected anti-heroes through the bowels of this anti-metropolis.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) is a hulking galoot hot on the trail of a killer who did in a sultry hooker and framed him for the murder. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is another frame job victim, only as a child-rapist. Dwight (Clive Owen) is involved in the killing of a cop that upsets the delicate balance of power between the mobsters, corrupt cops and self-regulating hookers in a tale that erupts like an overflowing toilet into the dark alleys of this new Gotham.

Continued...

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