Sin City (2005)

It’s been over ten years since Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller released their innovative collaboration in digital cinema, and Sin City still looks as good as it ever did. The decision to replicate the comics’ style as closely as possible proved to not only be the best way to tell the story on the big screen, but to also helped to keep the visuals fresh long after the novelty wore off. The all-digital backgrounds look like a living picture because they are based on the beautifully simplistic drawings by Miller. Sin City is probably the most faithful page-to-screen adaptation ever made.

Multiple storylines keep the film moving at a rapid-fire pace with traditional norms of character development and the three act structure condensed down. This helps keep the visuals fresh as new and gruesome antagonists and conflicts are thrown at you. The voice-over narration never gets tiresome, as new leading men articulate each story. The visual style, make-up, and costuming are all the spectator needs to understand the world and people who inhabit it, with little exposition or explanation.

The film is divided into vignettes of roughly three (and a half) stories who bare a thin resemblance to each other with themes revolving around abused women/girls and the flawed men who must save them from horrific fates. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) seems to be the only decent cop on the Basin City police force; he tracks a pedophile killer (who also happens to be the son of a senator) and manages to save a young girl from being violated. Marv (Mickey Rourke) is a cross between Frankenstein, a Neanderthal, and an ancient warrior with his own code of honor; he is granted the night of his life from a goddess of a prostitute (on the house), Goldie (Jamie King), only to be framed for her subsequent murder. Dwight (Clive Owen) hooks up with Shellie (Brittany Murphy) just in time to punish her abusive boyfriend/corrupt cop, Johnny Boy (Benicio Del Toro), and start a war between Johnny’s crew and the badass ladies of the evening who run their own city-within-the-city, Old Town.

The question of honor and true (not legal) justice repeats throughout the film, it is the thin veil separating the anti-heroes from the supervillains. It’s Hartigan’s last day before retirement and his few remaining hours before an imminent heart attack, so he decides to do the right thing, but in his previous years on the force he looked the other way. Marv loathes violence against women so much that he brutally slaughters dozens to seek revenge, but still manages to knock out Goldie’s sister Wendy (to save her from witnessing his horrors). Dwight’s blinding case of white knight syndrome kills friend and foe alike, and almost reduces the ladies of Old Town to slaves.

The brief plot descriptions should give an indication that this is not for the easily offended. With his comic, Miller concentrated and heighten the most subversive elements of pulp novels and film noir. This is everything they couldn’t have said or shown, with plenty of twistedness they could have never thought of added in for good measure, including cannibalism, talking corpses, and a putrid figure known as the Yellow Bastard.

In the midst of the early 2000s comic films (the first rounds of X-Men and Spiderman flicks), there was a brief move to bring a couple of the most respected, award-winning, and poetic graphic novels to the screen. The Watchmen (2009) had mixed reviews and didn’t fare too well at the box office, but Sin City got both the critical recognition and audience reception it deserved. The stark black and white picture (with carefully chosen splashes of color), bleak cityscapes, brutal violence, and voice-over narration mark it as a neo-noir and pulp fiction of the highest order.