Sin City

B+

Robert Rodriguez is a fun director. On the DVD for Once Upon a Time in Mexico he showed how you could make a great movie without spending a hundred million dollars. So it isn't very surprising to see him take another leap into the future, embracing technology, and finding a new way to tell a story. Or stories. In fact there are several stories he tells in Sin City, based on different stories from the comic book series Sin City. There is no mistaking the basis for this movie. Everything looks like a comic book with the sharp contrasts, jagged people, overly endowed women (all strippers or prostitutes), and odd perspectives. In that way, every frame of this movie is a visual masterpiece just as every picture in a comic book is its own work of art. The entire movie is very violent, very noir, and black and white with highlights of color: red lips, blue eyes, etc.

The stories themselves are not really to my taste. While they won't let your attention wane, they are very much pulp. They don't aspire to much more than telling a sensationalized story. Good guys get hit by a hundred bullets and live, while one shot is usually enough for a bad guy, or at least one of the poor guards at the bad guy's hideout. In the end, you get a little tired of the flashy visual style, the non-stop violence, and the noir dialogue. Though there are really only a few stories, divided into four parts, the whole enterprise would have been better served leaving one of the parts out.

The DVD extras (I got it from Netflix, so there could be another disc of features I didn't get) consisted of one very short set of interviews about how Rodriguez was able to get the project going. We see a few glimpses of the filming which was all done digitally using green screens. The actors say they can't wait to see the movie, and no wonder, since they couldn't have had much of an idea of what it would actually look like.

While I really enjoyed the concept and admire what Rodriguez has done in bringing a comic book to life, in the end I felt a little let down by the story itself. Still, I'll give it a B+.

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