100% pure style
Sin City is being marketed over here as “The first masterpiece of 2005”. Needless to say it was a reviewer who provided that PR grab but this reviewer begs to differ.
Sin City has more directors than any film I’ve ever seen before. Robert Rodriquez (El Mariachi, Desperados, Spy Kids) and the author of the graphic novel the film is based on, Frank Miller, share directing credit while Quentin Tarantino is billed as a “special guest director”.
The film is a noir fantasy set in a city called Basin City, a town that bears more resemblance to the cities of Grand Theft Auto than to any real or imagined US metropolis. A lot of the commentary about the film before release consisted of warnings about the extreme violence of the content.
There should have been a warning about the banality of it all. This is a film which is consistently striking in every way but the most important – the story.
Bruce Willis is workmanlike as detective Hartigan and at least is playing a character close to his real age and, err condition. Hartigan is close to retirement and nursing a heart condition.
The best performance by far comes from another old battler Mickey Rourke as the supposedly ethical but brutal criminal Marv. Rourke is terrific but there is one minor problem: his performance is almost an exact reprise of his role as Henry Chinanski in Charles Bukowski’s Barfly.
There are a lot of women characters in the film, including Jaime King as Marv’s Goldie, Jessica Alba and Nancy Calahan and, dare I say it, Clive Owen as Dwight. But while the chicks have a lot of balls, they are still constantly in need of rescue by the guys.
This is a film where the actors are almost irrelevant, except as names to drag the punters in. The real stars of Sin City are the designers and art directors. The film is endlessly visually striking in stark black and white punctuated by sudden vivid splashes of colour – usually red.
But the plot is execrable: episodic and in the end not engaging at all. In the great noirs of the 1950s plot seemed effortless and the stars, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis (especially in the little-known classic Sweet Smell of Success) and Burt Lancaster, make Willis, Rourke and especially Owen look like minnows.
Comics, or graphic novels as some insist on calling them, have always had a symbiotic relationship with the movies. I haven’t read Miller’s original but on the evidence here there are a lot of clichéd elements – the tortured main characters prone to monologue, the clear distinction between good and evil, the essential frailty of women. All entirely predictable.
Sin City is not a masterpiece. It will have its day in the sun starting this week and then like so much of Hollywood’s recent production it will rightly be forgotten.
Sin City has more directors than any film I’ve ever seen before. Robert Rodriquez (El Mariachi, Desperados, Spy Kids) and the author of the graphic novel the film is based on, Frank Miller, share directing credit while Quentin Tarantino is billed as a “special guest director”.
The film is a noir fantasy set in a city called Basin City, a town that bears more resemblance to the cities of Grand Theft Auto than to any real or imagined US metropolis. A lot of the commentary about the film before release consisted of warnings about the extreme violence of the content.
There should have been a warning about the banality of it all. This is a film which is consistently striking in every way but the most important – the story.
Bruce Willis is workmanlike as detective Hartigan and at least is playing a character close to his real age and, err condition. Hartigan is close to retirement and nursing a heart condition.
The best performance by far comes from another old battler Mickey Rourke as the supposedly ethical but brutal criminal Marv. Rourke is terrific but there is one minor problem: his performance is almost an exact reprise of his role as Henry Chinanski in Charles Bukowski’s Barfly.
There are a lot of women characters in the film, including Jaime King as Marv’s Goldie, Jessica Alba and Nancy Calahan and, dare I say it, Clive Owen as Dwight. But while the chicks have a lot of balls, they are still constantly in need of rescue by the guys.
This is a film where the actors are almost irrelevant, except as names to drag the punters in. The real stars of Sin City are the designers and art directors. The film is endlessly visually striking in stark black and white punctuated by sudden vivid splashes of colour – usually red.
But the plot is execrable: episodic and in the end not engaging at all. In the great noirs of the 1950s plot seemed effortless and the stars, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis (especially in the little-known classic Sweet Smell of Success) and Burt Lancaster, make Willis, Rourke and especially Owen look like minnows.
Comics, or graphic novels as some insist on calling them, have always had a symbiotic relationship with the movies. I haven’t read Miller’s original but on the evidence here there are a lot of clichéd elements – the tortured main characters prone to monologue, the clear distinction between good and evil, the essential frailty of women. All entirely predictable.
Sin City is not a masterpiece. It will have its day in the sun starting this week and then like so much of Hollywood’s recent production it will rightly be forgotten.
1 Comments:
I look forward to it (although probably on DVD. Thanks for the link!
Post a Comment
<< Home