The Hard Goodbye

April 8, 2005

You know, if you’re looking for the Sin City website, you really have to be careful. If you don’t type http://www.sincitythemovie.com exactly, YOU WILL END UP BURIED IN PORN. The movie itself is pretty much as advertised. For better or worse, it is an exact replication of the books.

It’s visually stunning with its stark panels of black and white splashed with color, with computer generated backgrounds that carry the grit of reality as well as an elastic, exaggerated physicality that’s more reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons. The hard boiled voiceover needs to be pulled back a few notches. There’s lots of times where the voiceover is routinely describing the action on screen, which is bad in comics and awful on the big screen. The acting ranges from fantastic (Mickey Roarke) to pretty dang sucky (Michael Madsen, I look in your general direction).

Frank Miller’s Sin City books really wanted to be adult, but they’re not really mature, if you catch my drift. They’re gratuitously violent and there’s nudity everywhere, justified or no. The movie reproduces this as well, ratcheting up the violence just a touch and easing up on the nekkid. The stories never really go beyond “tough dudes have hearts of gold, protect girls that are nice, even though they work in the sex industry.” All three parts follow that template, give or take, and even by noir genre conventions that’s pushing it.

It’s pretty cool in some parts and it made me wince in others, but overall it was a decent enough way to kill an afternoon. Anyone that claims it’s the greatest movie ever made is probably a nerd, and will change their opinion when Star Wars: Episode III comes out anyway.

Posted in Moving Pictures