Sin City: You Can Be Too Loyal

Sin City looks unlike any movie I’ve ever seen before. Like the The
Incredibles before it, it teaches us what comic book movies (I know The
Incredibles wasn’t first a comic book, but that’s their inspiration) should
aspire to. They should render imagined worlds, not follow around guys in rubber
suits. It’s also the most effective use I’ve seen of an ‘all green screen’ movie,
which has no actual sets. In the past, I’ve found digital backgrounds to be
generally distracting. The heightened, stylized feel of the virtual backdrops
in Sin City enriched the film.

Sin City has balls, too. It’s all about guns, broads and the hard-boiled,
long-suffering anti-hero. What Sin City doesn’t have is a cohesive
plot. The trailer doesn’t tell you this, but the film is three separate short
films. They’re tangentially-related, but are essentially three stories, told
more or less in a serialized fashion. I was disappointed by this, and felt a
little misled by the film’s marketing. It’s like thinking you’re buying a novel
and ending up with a bunch of short stories. [more]

I assume these three stories map directly to the comic book. This is no surprise,
given that the books’ creator, Frank Miller, is credited as co-director. That
approach is great for the comics, but it doesn’t fly in the movies. Because
there are so many characters and so much plot to force into 126 minutes, the
film has no room to breath.

The best movies, in any genre, know when to pause. They stop for character
development, to foster subplots, to make us laugh and to mix up the pacing.
This makes any film, including action movies, better. Three examples:

• The great, awkward restaurant scene between Francis McDermott’s Francis McDermott character
  and her old friend in Fargo.
• The funniest scene in The Incredibles, where Edna Mode fills in
  Mrs. Incredible and shows off the costumes.
• Any number of sequences in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction.
  Tarantino over-uses the device, but they’re good examples.

In this movie, we meet 30-odd characters but never get to know them. That’s
fine for a comic book, but it’s unsatisfactory for a two-hour movie. I think
this is why I observed a disparity in the acting. The leading men–Mickey Rourke,
Bruce Willis and Clive Owen–had a crisp handle on their roles, while many of
the women–Rosario Dawson, Alexis Bledel and Jessica Alba (none are fantastic
performers to begin with)–really struggled. The men were playing archetypes,
while the women were playing against them.

Outside of its great style, Sin City has nothing new to show us. Noir
is a genre that’s, what, seventy years old. The script, the attitude and the
pacing are drawn directly from the genre without much reinvention. If you want
to see a more compelling, more even and more original noir film, check out Sin
City‘s neighbour across the river, Dark
City.