Amazon.com Customer Review of
2005 Movie Sin City
By on April 20, 2005
While it's probably a
total cliche to say it by now, Sin
City really is a wild
thrill ride of a movie, and quite possibly the most entertaining thing that
will hit theaters all year. Adapted by director Robert Rodriguez from Frank
Miller's graphic-novel series, it's an energetic slab of neo-noir, complete
with twisted characters, ambiguous morality, and deadly serious dialogue. For
those who thought the Kill Bill movies weren't bizarre or violent enough, Sin City
ought to seem like a stylish, action-packed gift from guy-movie heaven. It's
filled with negativity, outrageously over the-top bloodletting, and some of the
blackest humor known to man, but it all works anyway. I even managed to forgive
the incessant voice-over narration, normally a rather lazy device, because it's
so oddly poignant and poetic. It's not really that big a deal anyway, because
this movie is so impressive visually that the characters could speak in
gibberish and I'd probably still be moved to give it at least three stars.
It should be noted right off the bat that Sin City
is not a movie for everyone, but if you're the type who would like it you
presumably know who you are. IF you like crime movies, especially those filled
with action and atmosphere, you will almost certainly get a kick out of Sin City .
If you prefer lighter, more "socially redeeming" fare, you may still
like it, or you may be overcome with bile filling your throat for most of its
two-hour running time. It's all a matter of how willing you are to accept
what's going on without asking too many nagging questions like "How
exactly did Mickey Rourke just take out ten armed riot cops with nothing more
than his fists and a hatchet?" or "is it really possible or even
necessary to manually tear off a man's scrotum?". Everything about this
movie is utterly outsized, from the themes to the characters to the action, but
in the end it's a rousing success at what it intends to do, which is entertain.
It's precisely because this movie was so utterly entertaining that I found
myself unwilling to nitpick; you'll probably be too busy having your senses
assaulted to linger on any problems you may have with the movie. Nothing is
more key in movies (or TV, or novels for that matter) than getting the viewer
to suspend disbelief, to simply let go and enjoy what's transpiring regardless
of the plausibility level. Some of my favorite movies are wildly unrealistic,
but at some point when watching them I just decided to go with it. Sin City
is one such movie: I realized early on that the events unfolding onscreen bore
little to no resemblance to reality as presently constituted; I just didn't
care. I went to see this movie with my wife (who is, to put it mildly, not a
fan of dark or violent movies), and she may have summed up the experience of
watching it the best when she said simply "I was never bored." That,
ultimately, is the secret to Sin
City 's success: it's so
gripping to watch that it's hard to care about anything else.
As everyone (and
probably their brothers) knows by now, Sin City
was filmed using real actors against a black-and-white CGI background with some
touches of color added for dramatic effect. It may seem like a gimmick at
first, but Sin City is all about bringing the viewer
into a sort of parallel universe, so this unconventional device works
perfectly. Sin City is a movie dealing with lives on
the edge, and it conjures up a delightfully dark, grimy, and gritty atmosphere
to go match the depravity of its subject matter. Weighty themes and
over-the-top violence abound here, and it's only fitting that the movie's look
and feel should be so uniformly haunting. Consisting of three tangentially
related stories occurring out of sequence, Sin City
brings the viewer into an underworld populated by thieves, murderers, hookers,
and dirty cops, and the morality is viewed entirely in shades of grey. In the Basin City
of the movie, where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are even worse,
violence is often a virtue, or at the very least a prerequisite for survival.
If there's one redeeming value to Sin
City 's cartoonish
ultraviolence, it's that it's painfully clear that its recipients generally
deserve it.
Anyway, if there's one
theme running through all of these stories, it's that of redemption. The
protagonist in each tale (Bruce Willis's Hartigan, Rourke's Marv, and Clive
Owen's Dwight) is a most unlikely hero (although Hartigan is just a regular cop
and therefore not exactly bad, whereas it's clear that Marv and Dwight are murderers),
but each finds himself driven to acts of extreme courage and sacrifice in order
to see justice done. Sin
City portrays a kind of
heroism not typically seen in movies (especially big-budget, sanitized
Hollywood productions), one that comes from doing the right thing even when
it's nowhere near being the easiest thing. Rourke's Marv is probably the most
memorable character, a hulking thug with a highly overdeveloped sense of
vengeance who managed to arouse some of my sympathy even as he cut a swath of
unimaginable destruction through his enemies on his way to avenging a murdered
prostitute. Out of the legions of other figures in the movie, the great Benicio
Del Toro deserves some special mention as a comically malevolent crooked cop
who won't shut up even after he meets his unfortunate end.
Now, although I've
gone on too long already, I'd feel remiss if I didn't talk about Sin City 's
staggering violence quotient. Yes, this an extremely graphic movie, and much of
the violence is downright disturbing to watch (Elijah Wood's character being
cut up and fed to a wolf is a prominent example, even if much of the violence
in that case was implied), but it's just as true that context is an important
factor when considering just how offensive such bloodletting is. Now, for one
thing, Sin City is meant to be a piece of escapist
cinema, so nothing that takes place onscreen should be taken too seriously
anyway. After all, no one got offended during the scene in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail when King Arthur cut off the Black Knight's arms and legs; that
scene was meant to be funny and it was. Perhaps more to the point, the violence
here is so ludicrously over the top from the opening scene that it's hard to
imagine any rational person getting too upset. You have to just go with it; if
you're the kind of person who makes it a point to be huffy and offended all the
time you shouldn't be seeing this movie anyway. 'Nuff said
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