Plenty of severed limbs, decapitations and other forms of freelance flesh make appearances in Sin City. Blood flows in a number of colors -- bright red, fluorescent white and gruesome, neon orange. Bullets pierce bodies, swords splinter skulls and other unlucky souls suffer castrations, cannibalism, the electric chair and a score of other defilements.
And then there is the snow. Even with all of this carefully choreographed gore, I still found a blizzard to be Sin City's most powerful visual effect. In the film's final story -- Sin City weaves together three pulpy tales -- the flakes fall quietly and steadily, and they are luminescent, magical and gorgeously artificial.
At that moment, Sin City -- despite being the most graphically violent big-budget film ever -- feels like an old-time Hollywood movie. While the movie could induce nightmares, it is also, in its own way, sweetly nostalgic. This is a film that loves artifice the same way that Singin' in the Rain did.
Singin' in the Rain, along with many films noir and various other stage-bound Hollywood movies, used two-by-fours and gallons of paint to build its glorious unrealities.
Sin City instead uses pixels. With its 3-D digital backdrops and sophisticated tweaking of colors (the film is black and white, with a few reds, oranges and sepia tones tossed in), Sin City exists in some previously unexplored zone between full animation and traditional live-action films.
The source material, Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, follows a series of brutal criminals, battered cops and hardened hookers, all of whom live in the down-and-out neighborhoods of a hopeless, filthy city. The movie's opening credits consist of a glorious scan of Sin City's skyline, but then the movie keeps us in the muck with the rest of the vermin.
Among them: a hard-boiled cop (Bruce Willis) who is determined to stop a pedophile, who happens to be the son of a local politician; a pill-popping but lovable brute (Mickey Rourke) tracking down the man who killed his would-be girlfriend; and an underworld figure trying to stop a war between Sin City's hookers and its cops.
The cast includes plenty of notables, including Clive Owen, Elijah Wood, Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Josh Hartnett, Michael Clarke Duncan and Jessica Alba.
The cast is terrific and the visuals are eye-popping, but Sin City is a few area codes away from great film territory.
While it's honorable to stay true to Miller's masterpieces, Robert Rodriguez, who co-directed the film with Miller, was overly concerned with fidelity. And that limits Sin City's effectiveness. Miller's language, which can read like Spillane-inflected poetry on the page, can feel clunky, campy or redundant on the screen.
And since Miller's Sin City stories all unfold through his characters' internal monologues, we are left with an awful lot of voice-overs. Sin City has too much tell and an awful lot of show. That makes it feel herky-jerky.
Some will complain about the film's amorality and perceived sexism -- all of the women are hookers or strippers, except for one buxom, mostly naked parole officer. In one scene, Rourke's character Marv blows away a priest (played by Miller) in a confession booth. "Say amen," Marv tells him. This is Sin City, after all.
There's no doubt that Sin City is a remarkable exercise in style -- it looks more like a pulp comic than any film. The violence is awful enough to feel cartoonish, with moments when the entire audience flinched and then giggled.
The colors are distinctive, with a basic slate-gray palette punctuated by occasional splashes of color (an orange pill bottle, a red evening gown, the blue eyes of a hooker). The action is often spectacular, interspersed with quieter, evocative sequences.
And the prosthetics are convincing -- Rourke's new forehead and chin make him look just like Marv from Miller's The Hard Goodbye.
Rodriguez is the first filmmaker to make studio-style movies out of his home office -- he produced his Spy Kids franchise and a string of El Mariachi movies in Austin, Texas.
Sin City is by a significant margin his most sophisticated digital work -- the first live-action film I've seen, with the possible exception of 28 Days Later, where digital video feels more like an opportunity than a compromise.
This is a vivid and exhilarating work. Viewers need not understand Sin City's technical breakthroughs to appreciate it. But a strong stomach does help.
