Sin City

Sin City begins with a warn­ing: Shot & Cut by Robert Rodriguez. That isn’t the half of it – choose your method of muti­la­tion; they’re all on dis­play. It’s a smash hap­py hor­ror show of debil­i­tat­ing vio­lence, a blood-drenched gut-punch of com­ic book freak­ery. But beyond the can­ni­bal­ism and car­nage, just what kind of a town is this?

Frank Miller’s kind of town. Sin City is the killing joke of the Bat­man scribe and com­ic book leg­end. After mak­ing his name on Dare­dev­il and the sem­i­nal Dark Knight Returns in the 1980s, Miller ush­ered in the nineties with his first solo ven­ture: an episod­ic Guig­nol of broads and bul­lets span­ning a loose­ly struc­tured 13-part run; a dis­til­la­tion of Amer­i­can pulp set in the back alleys and whore­hous­es of Sin City.

At first reluc­tant to part with the rights, Miller suc­cumbed to one of the few fig­ures in Hol­ly­wood with the vision, and the stom­ach, to bring Sin City to life. Robert Rodriguez is a rare spec­i­men – a movie hooli­gan with a seat at the high table. A technophile and a pas­sion­ate com­ic book fan, one proof of con­cept was all it took for Rodriguez to get Miller on board.

That proof of con­cept (even­tu­al­ly to become the movie’s pro­logue) set the tone for an adap­ta­tion of three of Sin City’s most grue­some yarns. In The Hard Good­bye the scarred killer Marv (Mick­ey Rourke) is out for revenge on a can­ni­bal­is­tic ser­i­al killer work­ing for the church. The Big Fat Kill is the sto­ry of the whores of Old Town and their bat­tle for con­trol of the city after crooked cop Jack­ie Boy (Beni­cio del Toro) is mur­dered on their turf. That Yel­low Bas­tard book­ends the film.

Fol­low­ing a long incar­cer­a­tion for cas­trat­ing the son of a pow­er­ful sen­a­tor before he could rape a young girl called Nan­cy, Har­ti­gan (Bruce Willis), Basin City’s last good cop, is released and tricked into track­ing her down. The senator’s son, now hideous­ly deformed, comes look­ing for payback.

The bare bones of Sin City dips a toe into Miller’s imag­i­na­tion, but it doesn’t come close to cap­tur­ing his deranged artistry. It’s a col­li­sion of two clas­sic Amer­i­can tra­di­tions: the com­ic book, with its school­boy dreams of hero­ism; and pulp, a lit­er­ary grind­house of shad­ows and cyn­i­cism, a vision of the anti-hero etched in greys.

Shot in full colour against green screen back­drops then con­vert­ed to high qual­i­ty black and white, Sin City is a land­mark of the dig­i­tal age. Though the tech­nol­o­gy it employs is no longer ground break­ing, it’s a film of unique beau­ty – a heady brew of high-res­o­lu­tion wiz­ardry splashed with droplets of res­o­nant colour, at once gor­geous and por­ten­tous. In a moment, as Josh Hart­nett strides out onto a rain-swept bal­cony and that blood-red dress ignites the screen, the clichés of a tired genre are reinvigorated.

Though Rodriguez is at pains to give the cred­it for this style to Miller (even resign­ing his place at the DGA to secure the writer a co-direc­tor nod) his own role shouldn’t be under­es­ti­mat­ed. Miller writes like the dev­il, but his illus­tra­tions are giv­en to wild grotesqueness.

The pan­els of a com­ic book can con­tain this exag­ger­at­ed, aggres­sive style, but to big screen audi­ences weened on Spi­der-Man it’s an unfa­mil­iar evo­ca­tion of the com­ic book uni­verse. Rodriguez brings a sense of clar­i­ty to these images – strip­ping them down to size with­out dent­ing their grandeur.

Giv­ing flesh to the ink is a bewil­der­ing array of tal­ent. It’s a small mir­a­cle in itself that the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of Sin City’s star pow­er doesn’t tear the movie in half. Quite the reverse. This is a movie that needs star pow­er. Not to sell it, but because Miller’s char­ac­ters are such febrile expres­sions of noir icon­o­clasm that it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine civil­ians fill­ing their shoes.

Bruce Willis hasn’t looked this alive since Pulp Fic­tion. If he’s too vig­or­ous to play a cop one heart tremor away from per­ma­nent retire­ment, at least it mol­li­fies his rela­tion­ship with Nan­cy – an old man’s seedy wish ful­fil­ment. Del Toro and Owen pro­vide the usu­al fire­works, Jes­si­ca Alba and Rosario Daw­son are a fine­ly weight­ed bal­ance of mur­der­ous beau­ty, but the rev­e­la­tion is Mick­ey Rourke.

He’s had his fin­ger on the self-destruct but­ton for longer than some of his co-stars have been alive, and he finds in Marv an out­let of bloody redemp­tion. He’s a sadist and a killer, but in Rourke’s hands he’s also a vic­tim of painful self-aware­ness, and it’s his own suf­fer­ing that is the most shocking.

Equal­ly rev­e­la­to­ry is the script, a hard-boiled fil­ter of Alan Moore, Orson Welles and Ray­mond Chan­dler, ripped straight off the page of Miller’s orig­i­nal. The phrase ​‘com­ic book’ has been a con­de­scend­ing pre­fix in crit­ic speak for too long. It’s a breath of air to hear it as an art in itself – a sort of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry blank verse finessed by one of its great­est voic­es. At times it walks a fine line between high camp and low grit, and some of the cast strug­gle to do it jus­tice, but it cracks off the screen like a spark of electricity.

But for all its looks, its life and tal­ent, Sin City nev­er tru­ly escapes its ori­gins. In a sense there’s some­thing admirable about this. Com­ic books have long been a bas­tard child. Con­stant­ly crav­ing accep­tance and atten­tion instead of demand­ing respect on their own terms. In Amer­i­ca, comics are part of the fab­ric of cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, a cor­ner­stone of nation­al myth making.

And yet even in their moments of tri­umph comics (and com­ic book fans) have been abused and ridiculed by Hol­ly­wood. Mined and manip­u­lat­ed, but nev­er tak­en seri­ous­ly. Sin City is a bold attempt to redress this bal­ance: not an adap­ta­tion but the translit­er­a­tion of a com­ic book clas­sic to the big screen. Unadul­ter­at­ed, unapolo­getic, but ulti­mate­ly unsuccessful.

This is not a work that needs to leech cred­i­bil­i­ty from the movies. These pan­els, stretch­ing page after page, dis­tend­ed, frac­tured, cross­hatched, shad­ows rolling with dutched angles and queasy per­spec­tives rep­re­sent an infin­i­ty of time and pos­si­bil­i­ty that movies can’t repli­cate. No amount of jump cut­ting or high-def visu­al pyrotech­nics can replace the great­est asset of com­ic books: stillness.

Com­ic book artists have a thou­sand ways to draw move­ment and speed, but the most vivid moments of kinet­ic ener­gy are just that – moments frozen in time. They have space to breath, to stop and be drunk in. And between each pan­el is the tini­est of gaps filled with the imprint­ed expe­ri­ence of half a cen­tu­ry of com­ic mythol­o­gy. Each pan­el unique to itself, but impos­si­bly enriched. Cin­e­ma replaces silence with chat­ter, com­po­si­tion with cacophony.

So who is it for, this giant com­ic, inject­ed with noise and move­ment and run like a tick­er tape across the big screen? In movie terms, these three tales are episod­ic to the point of inco­her­ence, lack­ing any kind of sub­text to tie them togeth­er beyond some emp­ty idea of sac­ri­fice and revenge. As a fan, Rodriguez has noth­ing to give this sto­ry beyond his ser­vices as a tran­scriber. He has no life of his own to offer.

In that absence, Sin City is a token to the fan com­mu­ni­ty, a salve to balm the wounds of Hollywood’s rough ride. But pan­der­ing to the peo­ple most equipped to appre­ci­ate Miller’s work in its orig­i­nal form is a huge mis­take. It offers noth­ing but the illu­so­ry sat­is­fac­tion of the tail wag­ging the dog – of Hol­ly­wood fol­low­ing where comics lead. This is des­per­ate­ly ill-advised. Comics are unique. They don’t need to earn cred­i­bil­i­ty in any­one else’s eyes, just as the works of great authors have nev­er need­ed to.

That’s not to say that com­ic book adap­ta­tions should nev­er hap­pen, but they should nev­er be pur­sued for their own sake. Super­man, Bat­man and Spi­der-Man are dif­fer­ent – they’ve long been explored by dif­fer­ent voic­es, and they grow and evolve with each new take. But Sin City is a one off. A sto­ry that’s been told, and told per­fect­ly. Why crave any more than that? And what of the future? Why crave any more of Watch­men or V for Vendet­ta? What else do they have to say that hasn’t already been said?

These are dis­qui­et­ing times for com­ic book fans. Do they embrace this idea of accept­abil­i­ty dan­gled by Hol­ly­wood, or do they have the con­fi­dence to turn away. It doesn’t have to be about elit­ism, it could be as sim­ple as under­stand­ing that the val­ue of comics is some­thing far more pre­cious than box office fore­cast­ers can perceive.

They say that if you walk down an alley in Sin City you can find almost any­thing. Go look for your­self, you might be sur­prised at what’s out there.