There's no guilt in Sin City

Welcome to Sin City. On your left, you’ll see Jessica Alba’s gyrating body. On the right, please note the rabid Nazi-ninjas. If you take a look behind you, you’ll see a few slashed corpses. Don’t worry about the smell; it’s just the tar on those bodies. If this, and much, much more in the vein of anarchic fun sounds like your cup of tea, Robert Rodriguez’s comic-book adaptation is right up your alley.

If you’ve heard the buzz about Sin City, and boy is it deafening, you’ve probably heard that the film is “highly stylized.” Based on Frank Miller’s groundbreaking graphic novels, Sin City has been painstakingly brought to the screen: every frame oozing with monochromatic detail. What makes the visuals so outstanding, however, are the splashes of color—turning eyes electric blue and lips a luscious red—and the lighting that makes bandages glow like beacons and guns shimmer in the moonlight.

Sin City is a film about the underworld, and so naturally it tells the stories of some seriously bad men and women: cops with attitude, whores with violent tendencies, mercenaries with means. The cast is star-studded—Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood all enjoy substantial screen time; Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen and Michael Clarke Duncan have small roles—each actor seeming eager to ditch their Hollywood glamour in exchange for leather-studded, half-nude naughtiness.

There is a ton of violence, from spears through stomachs all the way to genitalia ripped from bodies by hand; it’s brutal, loud and bloody, but it never becomes sickening. The gore comes so frequently and in such large quantities that it eventually transcends brutality and turns comic.

The plot, not surprisingly, is a secondary concern. There is absolutely no connection between the three stories that comprise the heart of the film. In fact, watching Sin City is a lot like watching a series of short films, tied together only with visual flair. Unlike Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee & Cigarettes, which was also constructed as a series of vignettes, there is no underlying current to the narratives of Sin City other than the occasionally overlapping locations. John Hartigan’s (Bruce Willis) story opens and closes the film, but other than that there is essentially no continuity between the tales. If you’re not enthralled by the violence, the story isn’t going to keep you involved.

This substantial plot void brings up an interesting question: is Rodriguez’s work truly faithful to Miller’s original? Sure, he recreates frame after frame of the comic books down to the finest detail, but is this mirror-image style of filmmaking really beneficial to the stories? The fact of the matter is that graphic novels and films are completely different mediums of art: if you get bored with a comic, or you find yourself caught in the waning light of a summer eve, the book can be closed. Not so with a film. In film the audience needs to have eyes firmly locked on screen for its duration, to be entangled in a plot full of characters they care about, that they love or hate. Sin City doesn’t have such a plot, nor enough fully fleshed characters to maintain the interest of anyone but the most hardcore of the comic book geeks. Rodriguez’s “highly stylized” project-noir will unfortunately have to settle for the backseat role of cult classic. Again, welcome to Sin City: hypnotic visual mastery locked away under a mess of well-intentioned replication.