"Sin City"

Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and Mickey Rourke star in this brash, sick-as-hell comic-book noir.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Bruce Willis, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

April 1, 2005 | Aesthetically exciting and sick as hell, "Sin City" is so disreputable that it practically turns itself inside-out into a spectacle of virginal innocence: Blunt, devoid of metaphor and unapologetically depraved, it radiates a perverse kind of purity. In the early minutes of the picture, an aging cop with a bad ticker prepares to shoot the nuts off a child molester -- but first, he shouts a warning to the terrified 11-year-old girl he's just rescued from the sicko's clutches: "Cover your eyes, Nancy! I don't want you to see this."

His warning is an admission that there are some things decent, God-fearing folk just aren't fit to see, and an assurance that "Sin City" is going to catalog them dutifully and in exacting detail. As tawdry spectacles go, "Sin City" is scrupulously honest. Like an unfiltered Camel, it delivers tar and nicotine straight to the system, with no fussy preamble.

The directors of "Sin City" are Robert Rodriguez (who made the 1993 low-budget groundbreaker "El Mariachi" and its two sequels, as well as the "Spy Kids" pictures, the first two of which are wonderful) and Frank Miller, the creator of the pulp comic-book series on which the movie is based. "Sin City" is a rare instance in which a comic book's creator has been invited to participate in a film adaptation in any meaningful way. That's significant, now that the world of comic books has become such a salmon farm for moviemaking.

There have been marvelous comic-book movies in recent years (Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy") as well as lavish but limp-spirited ones (the two "Spider-Man" pictures). But "Sin City" looks nothing like either of those movies. Theoretically, comic books are natural source material for the movies, but even the best ones often feel simply like movies with comic-book elements grafted on. "Sin City," on the other hand, is brazenly organic, like a novel made of moving pictures. Highly stylized and meticulously styled (it relies largely on digital compositions and was shot with a digital high-definition camera), it lacks the loose, crazy feel that can make movies feel so alive. On the other hand, so many conventional pictures these days forbid loose craziness to begin with. "Sin City" may be a digitally controlled universe, but it's one that glints with hard, glittery life.

That's essential, because pulp needs life; even the very word "pulp" suggests something moist, alive and blood-gorged (even though, historically speaking, the term refers to the cheap paper on which pulp novels were printed). Rodriguez and Miller have adapted three Miller tales and pieced them together into a movie with a pulse. "Sin City," as Miller has mapped it out in his books, is an urban landscape of busted promises and dreams shot full of bloody, gaping holes, a place where corruption thrives and nobility and virtue are choked off whenever they attempt to take a breath.

This movie Sin City is patrolled restlessly by people like Bruce Willis' Hartigan, the last honest cop in town, a guy who risks his life to save that of a little girl, only to find that no good deed goes unpunished. Mickey Rourke (in heavy prosthetics) is Marv, a hulking square-jawed, sad-eyed loner who sets out to avenge the death of a hooker named Goldie (Jaime King), one of the few people to extend genuine kindness to him. And Clive Owen is Dwight, a detective who moves through the city like a perennial 5 o'clock shadow. So seemingly well-adjusted he has the potential to go truly nuts, Dwight sets out to protect his new girlfriend, cocktail waitress Shellie (Brittany Murphy), from her wacko ex-boyfriend (Benicio Del Toro) and ends up running into his real true love, a black-leather-clad Sadean goddess named Gail (Rosario Dawson), whose pull on him is sexually and spiritually magnetic. (In their grandest scene together, he beams at her after the two have fended off a whole neighborhood of evildoers in a rat-a-tat blood bath and, in voice-over, tenderly proclaims her his "Valkyrie.")

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