Friday, April 01, 2005 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Sin City'

Pulp Friction: Noirish style of 'Sin City' is done in by its violent, empty excess

A cop on his last case, Hartigan (Bruce Willis) gets his man in "Sin City."

As Abraham Lincoln once opined, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

Lincoln reportedly coined that convenient phrase for a book review, but if he had been charged with reviewing "Sin City," he might have been tempted to resurrect it.

It certainly expresses my ambivalence regarding a movie with much to recommend it -- except, perhaps, its very essence.

From its rogues' gallery of characters to its silvery, shadowy camerawork, "Sin City" serves up a feast of ultra-cool cinematic style. But it's a junk-food feast, an orgy of overkill designed to disguise -- or, more precisely, to celebrate -- the fact that "Sin City's" style is its substance.

For some audiences, that's far from a problem. For others, including me, it's an invitation to empty excess -- and a party I'd just as soon avoid, despite the ample filmmaking flair on display.

Writer-director Robert Rodriguez (whose disparate credits range from "Desperado" to "Spy Kids") co-directed "Sin City" with its comic-book creator, Frank Miller -- and resigned from the Directors Guild so he could share the directorial credit.

Together, they create a fascinating, feverish setting for the movie.

It's a hermetically sealed digital realm, a black-and-white nightmare world -- punctuated by portentous splashes of color -- that bears a surface resemblance to the fabled terrain of film noir.

But don't be fooled by "Sin City's" distinctive look -- or by the hard-boiled talk its hard-boiled guys and dolls spout.

True film noir, which flourished in the post-World War II era, exudes a world-weary fatalism reflecting the shattered idealism of those times. By now, however, nobody cares about such quaint 20th-century notions as idealism.

Certainly not Rodriguez, whose computer-generated settings provide an all-too-appropriate backdrop for the movie's soulless brutality and hyper-stylized, in-your-face action.

"Sin City" owes some of its swaggering machismo, gleeful ultra-violence and intertwined story lines to Quentin Tarantino's trend-setting "Pulp Fiction."

Thus, it hardly seems coincidental that Tarantino himself turns up on "Sin City's" credit list as "guest director" for one outrageous sequence. (It's also probably not coincidental that it's one of the movie's standout scenes.)

Based on three Miller tales, "Sin City" interweaves three major stories and a host of sideline details as characters wander in and out of each other's overheated, underhanded lives.

There's the haunted Marv (Mickey Rourke), a hulking street tough who finds a brief moment of bliss with a dream dame named Goldie (Jaime King). When he wakes up and finds her next to him -- stone cold dead -- he scours Sin City's scummiest corners to avenge the loss of the only love he's ever known.

Detective Dwight ("Closer's" Clive Owen), adept at working both sides of the law, keeps trying to sidestep trouble, only to wind up chin-deep in danger when the very nasty death of a very nasty cop touches off a turf war between the police and a squad of truly fatale femmes led by his favorite lady of the night (Rosario Dawson).

And then there's Hartigan (stalwart "Pulp Fiction" veteran Bruce Willis), the last honest cop in "Sin City," who's on the trail of a sicko serial rapist and murderer (Nick Stahl) who preys on little girls. He finally gets his man -- but enrages some very powerful people in the process, forcing him to face consequences he never expected.

Along the way, "Sin City" introduces a host of other vividly vile characters, from a smilingly corrupt cop (Benicio Del Toro) to a bespectacled psychopath ("Lord of the Rings' " heroic Frodo, Elijah Wood) to an angelic stripper with a dark secret ("Dark Angel's" Jessica Alba) to a sassy tavern wench (a hammy Brittany Murphy) to a sultry lesbian probation officer ("Spy Kids' " Carla Gugino) given to strutting around topless because -- well, just because that's the kind of burg "Sin City" is.

That's also the kind of movie "Sin City" is.

Literally ripped from the pages of Miller's graphic novels, which inspired the computer-created backdrops, the movie adaptation revels in casual nihilism, creating a pulpy world that's black and white and red all over.

Every man's a killer. Every woman's a stripper or a hooker -- or resembles one. And as the drop-dead characters spout dialogue or world-weary voice-overs that would make Mickey Spillane cringe, "Sin City" lurches from one over-the-top sequence to the next, not so much building momentum as daring audiences to endure another round of brutish excess.

More's the pity, because in between the blood and guts, "Sin City" shows glimmers of genuine style.

Beyond its startling, otherworldly visuals, "Sin City" also showcases a variety of arresting performances.

Veterans Rutger Hauer and Powers Boothe, as unlikely but equally corrupt brothers, ooze decaying depravity in brief supporting roles, while Del Toro delivers a quirky turn that's equal parts horror and hilarity. And Rourke finds the anguish beneath Marv's beastly exterior -- a character whose "Dick Tracy"-style makeup renders him unrecognizable for a better reason than his multiple cosmetic surgeries usually do.

But these attributes, impressive in themselves, do nothing to alleviate "Sin City's" unrelenting tone of cruelty-is-cool excess.

The movie's not about anything other than itself. And, as a result, it seems a lonely place indeed.

To paraphrase poet William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," we are led to believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye.

See with your eyes and "Sin City" may knock them out.

See through them, however, and you'll see how empty those shadowy streets truly are.