A "review" of Frank Miller's Sin City

Mock my timeliness if you wish, but I finally got around to seeing Sin City last night.

It was good. I found parts of it a little confusing, like for instance the twenty minute period in the film when no one's genitals were being mutilated. When the first ten minutes of a movie shows a man getting his goods shot off at close range by a veritable cannon for the hand, and then it revisits the concept of men losing their luggage so to speak, you begin to expect it. "This is a movie about people experiencing great damage to their penises," you think. "They should've called it Castrato City."

So you, the audience, get used to seeing the characters in Sin City getting roughed up in a Tarantino-esque fashion that, instead of a razor and an ear lobe, involves a hatchet to the groin, for example. And then boom! The movie starts getting fuzzy and the newest story line isn't about penises getting mutilated at all. Did the projectionist get the reels out of order? Is this the same "ultra noir ode to Raymond Chandler" movie that I started seeing, or just an incredible simulation?

Fortunately, the movie gets right back on track with a man pulling another's genitals off with his bare hands.

That's right. He yanked his crank. Off.

If this is the kind of thing that makes you feel queasy and you have to cross your legs, you probably should skip Sin City. These actors are living cartoons, and their world is one that defies all our laws of physics. A single bullet can pick a big burly man off his feet and slam him into a far wall in Sin City, not because of a balancing equation of mass-over-momentum, but because it looks fucking cool. And so it goes: the seedy side of Sin City gets its moment in the sun and it's all because people punch, kick, shoot, stab, and venge their loved ones in a highly stylistic manner that people haven't seen since Robert Stack quit The Untouchables.

Sin City is carnage. Oh, it's spectacular carnage shot from different angles in stark black and white. But there is no rationale to it. Rather, the rationale is as flat as the pulp magazine pages that spawned the idea that it's OK to murder half the city in order to avenge the death of the hooker you met last night. Don't get me wrong: I hope that no one expects to obtain moral guidance from a movie called Sin City. All the same, modern films always have to have some sort of plot that justifies itself in the end. Billy Crystal herds cattle with his friends for a week and learns about himself in the process, but why? Oh, I got it: he's starting to go through a midlife crisis and he goes to a cowboy ranch for his vacation. Hilarity ensues and the movie progresses. But what reason is there to start a one man war over a dead hooker whose last name you don't even know? Because it's cool. No one in Sin City does anything that doesn't reinforce their silent creed of "Goddammit I'm awesome". And so the visceral parade of carnage that you witness for two hours justifies itself. You are watching genitals be treated poorly because deep down, you kind of always wanted to see it. People can walk out of Sin City, or they can cover their eyes, but they don't. The truth is that the film speaks to the darkest recesses of the human soul: the unfathomable loss of civility that we have spent millennia creating. We want to be the guy who blows the rapist's scrotum off. We want to be the guy who rips bars out of jail cell windows with his bare hands. We want to be the anti-hero, devoid of every problem but one: a thirst to right a wrong, whether it's a straight cop on a crooked force fighting to save a hostage or a psychopath killing the guy who murdered your favorite whore. We wish to wear the trenchcoat that billows perfectly against the stark moonlit backdrop of a grungy cityscape at midnight. We want to have the pistol that never jams and fire that last bullet in the chamber that always hits its mark.

And so we see that Sin City is our darkest desires coming to fruition: there is a single lawyer in the film, and he gets his arm broken in three places. Without a real presence of law, the denizens are able to pursue their own brand of justice, and if that happens to involve a penis getting hacked to bits, so be it.

In Sin City, the men are men. And the women? Hot damn the women are women. I haven't seen characterizations like this since I finished The Big Sleep. Now, I will not pretend to be a comic book snob here and allude to the fact that I've been a Frank Miller fan for way longer than any of your poseurs who are late jumping on the bandwagon. This is not the case: I'm not a Miller fan, and I've never read the Sin City comics (or, if you must, "graphic novels"). But I'm familiar with the style, and I have to say that everyone agrees that Miller's ink has been converted perfectly onto film. Miller wraps his imagination around us and we are welcomed into his world where a man's only friend is his sidearm and every woman is capable of clocking you in the back of the head with a blunt object. Where Raymond Chandler went more for the substance of an unfolding mystery and the inherent intrigue, Miller chooses the style of black on white paneling and high contrast blood spatter. It's an obvious choice, really: one works well written, the other drawn. We don't really get an opportunity to get a backstory on our anti-heroes or their prey. We just get the action and the severing of penises, and the story of Sin City lacks for it. In practice, the audience doesn't really get a chance to wonder why IRA mercenaries are hanging around in the La Brea tarpits. We just know that they're there and shit's gonna get blown up any second now. And very quickly, details like "What the hell is going on here?" disappear because we're holding onto our seats and trying to follow along with the carnage.

And so, we can never know why our characters all have a dark past. We don't get that insight into their behavior. We just know that they have a hot button that's going to get poked, and when it does, they're going to start shooting. I don't think you should look to Sin City for rich character depth. You should look to it for car chases, gunfights, and as many big titties as Robert Rodriguez could squeeze into every shot.

Seriously? Damn fine film. Proof that comics can get a major motion picture treatment that doesn't suck. Proof that Hollywood can't provide that, but a dedicated director who bucks the system can. (Rodriguez's production company is called Troublemaker Studios. That's a good sign.) Here's to hoping that lightning can strike twice.