here is no virtue without sin.
That may as well be the motto of Sin City, the ironic nickname for Basin City, a corrupt metropolis somewhere in the mythical Southwest. In Sin City, all the guys are psycho killers, bad cops or dark knights, and all the dames are angels, strippers with hearts of gold or hookers with nasty swords. Sometimes all at once.
Take Marv (Rourke). With a mug so ugly no hooker would even let him buy sex, he's found the next best thing to love in the person of Goldie (Jaime King), a blond bombshell in a tight red dress. When Goldie turns up dead, Marv will move heaven and earth to avenge her.
Then there's Hartigan (Willis), a cop with a bad ticker who's on the verge of retirement, except for one last assignment: save skinny little Nancy Callahan, an 11-year-old girl who has been abducted by a vicious serial killer. It's Hartigan's bad luck that the killer (Nick Stahl) happens to be the only son of the powerful and ruthless Senator Roark (Powers Booth). When Hartigan administers his own form of brutal justice, it's not the killer who has to pay. It's the hapless cop himself.
And what about Dwight (Clive Owen)? He finds himself drawn into a battle between the armed hookers of Sin City's Old Town, led by Gail (Dawson), and the cops who can't keep their pants on, led by the sinister Jackie Boy (Del Toro). When things go south and the mob steps in, led by the one-eyed Manute (Michael Clarke Duncan), it's up to Dwight to salvage the day or see Old Town descend into a nightmare of killing.
In another words, it's just another day in Sin City. ...
No loyalty except to the source
Sin City, from the graphic novel series by Miller, is an oddity: either a new destination on the Hollywood highway or a curious backwater off the main thoroughfare. But it is unique in several ways. It is the first film that lifts virtually all of its dialogue and images directly from a comic (no one even gets a writing credit on the movie, perhaps another first). It is the only movie in memory to include the curious credit of "special guest director" in the person of Quentin Tarantino, who stepped in to helm a single sequence. And it may be the first time that a director of some clout, Spy Kids' Rodriguez, went to the mat to share helming chores with a neophyte partner: Miller, who came up with the whole Sin City universe but never before helmed a film, yet for whom Rodriguez famously quit the Directors Guild of America when the union objected to the dual credit.
Whether that translates into a compelling piece of cinema is another question entirely.
Like the graphic novels, the Sin City film is lurid, overblown, passionate, violent, poignant and arresting. Like the books, the film offers a retro-noir netherworld that is neither real nor artificial, an oddly gray place, which is ironic, given the film's starkly black-and-white look and themes. And what works or doesn't work in the film can be blamed in part on the same things that work or don't work in the comic.
The strongest of the film's narrative threads—and there are too many of them to make for a fully satisfying movie—is likely the strongest of the original Sin City books: "The Hard Goodbye," which tracks Rourke's Marv in his single-minded quest for vengeance. Much of that is attributable to Rourke's hyperbolic acting and coiled, animalistic performance, an over-the-top style that completely fits the movie. Willis, by contrast, seems undersized in his own story, "That Yellow Bastard."
The weakest thread—"The Big Fat Kill"—suffers from the same overly elaborate storyline as the comic, whose concept and look are more interesting than its characters or story.
When Sin City hits—as it does when Hartigan and Nancy spark, or when Marv rants against the universe—it pierces the mind like a dog howling in a dark forest. When it misfires, like Jackie Boy's pistol, it smacks you in the head like a gun barrel: obvious, adolescent, misogynistic, brutal.
