I’m new here, hope I got the spoiler technique down… here’s a review i posted on another board a short while back… Spoilers, below,… hopefully I got the spoiler tags right,…
Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005).
I very much want Robt. Rodrieguez and Frank Miller’s film adaptation of Sin City to be a rousing critical and financial success, first because I’ve been a fan of Frank Miller’s work since my friends were giving pause at the powerful storytelling hinted at in this “crude Gil Kane imitator’s” work way back when he first started working on Spiderman and Daredevil stories for Marvel, and second, because I believed a visually unique, critically acclaimed comic book based movie would be good for all of us, comic book consumers and producers, with ambitions beyond the four color world. I wanted to be able to dance out of that theatre last night, able to recommend this movie wholeheartedly to the world.
I’m sorry to say, in good conscience, on a scale from one to a hundred, I could only give it a 70%. The reasons are mixed. They have to do with some casting choices, particularly of women’s roles (strangely, while most of the women are really good in small roles, the actresses in three important parts failed to convince) the treatment of violence and sex in the story, and sadly the overall faithfulness of the adaptation, which I prayed would be the film’s strongest selling point. These are all small criticisms, but taken together, they had the cumulative effect of hurting the total package as a whole. I will try to address this treatment by treatment, as no less than four (actually five) of Frank Miller’s stories were adapted in this anthology. [ul]Sin City: the Hard Goodbye was by far the most sucessful of the three adaptations of Miller’s longer stories recounted here. This is owed in large part to the strength of Mickey Rourke’s Marv. While I agreed with a good friend of mine, Boogie Down Adam, that Michael Rooker could’ve been a great Marv, after seeing Mickey Rourke’s delivery, I have to say, he “owns” Marv herein after. Rourke does a great job here of conveying both Marv’s grim humor, and the characters ferocious Frankenstein’s Monster-like movements and gestures. He saved this sequence, no question.
That said, I had quibbles with the staging of some scenes, and the acting of some of the women players in others. For instance, the short version of Marv’s extended moment of near despair in the rain, when he mulls over the enormity of his task, magnified by the knowledge of exactly who his primary target is, should have been longer, as it was in the original comic book treatment. Likewise, Elijah Wood’s Kevin (no fault of the actor) wasn’t on screen long enough in any sequence to come off as threatening as he should. Here we could’ve used an added scene, however gruesome, of Kevin “at work, at play”, or at dinner. Carla Guigno Lucillle whose traumatized monologue, about what she endured at Kevin’s hands (and the heads on the wall), failed to get the audience properly terrified at Kevin and his awful potential.
The same could be said of Jaime King’s Goldie/Wendy. King is perfectly fine at emboding Wendy’s anger, but despite great lighting, doesn’t convey either sisters overpowering sexuality. We need to see her as Marv see’s her: a god send to the damned. (At the risk of sounding like an utter horndog, we needed to see an longer sex scene earlier on, in Marv’s memories of his night with Goldie, not to see more of her “in action” but more of Marv’s facial expressions - we never really feel his need - something we need to see, to understand his decision to bring down the Power in Basin City, no matter what might bar his way). This is compounded by the flat, meekness of much of King’s delivery of what little (but critical) dialogue she had. She had to convince us of her rage, and her gratitude later on. As it was, her lines just fell flat.
Speaking of lines, throughout all four stories fully presented here, there were lines of dialogue, however well placed in the comic book original, were simply unnecessary in the kenetic medium of film, and landed like bricks in the middle of their scenes, because they bespoke the obvious, too plainly and too blandly, when transferred to the screen.
While it was, all-around, the best acted of the four full stories recounted in Sin City (almost everyone was very, very good in thier roles here - many - Brittany Murphy as Stephanie, Rosario Dawson as Gail, Alexis Bledel as Becky, among others - were outstanding in small roles), there were four big problems with the The Big Fat Kill that drastically lessened the impact of the story at hand. First off, we needed another added scene here, something that explained in cinematic shorthand, just what Clive Owen’s Dwight owes Gail and the Women of Old Town. Without it, Owen’s convincing Dwight comes off as a bit of a noble loon, spoiling for a bloody, awful fight, almost without reason. It just comes off as strange, however threatening Benicio Del Toro’s** Jack Rafferty **and Crew. (No wonder the NYTimes called Dwight a psychopath). Compounding that was the staging of the scene where Dwight and Women of Old Town contemplate the price of failure. I really do think we needed to see a graphic montage of past suffering, the hell the women suffered before they won thier tenuous freedom: we had to be convinced of the desperation of thier cause, and the value they represented, as an exploitable resource to the Basin City Mafia.
Another surprising weakness was the casting of Devon Aoki as Miho. I have read elsewhere that she is a fine actress (I haven’t seen her in anything as yet), and I would like to be supportive. Miho is essentially, a minature engine of destruction. An actress playing Miho doesn’t have to be buff, but she should be toned, and move with the ferocious feral grace of an Angela Mao (a big kung fu movie star of the seventies). Rodrieguez should have cast one of the younger up and coming, highly trained Hong Kong starlets or a graduate of the same Chinese academy that gave us Zhang Ziyi for this role. We have to believe Miho is a threat just by looking at her. Aoki just doesn’t move well enough in action, nor look lean and mean enough, to convince here. Her form and figure simply shows too much baby fat to be convincing in this role, and she just doesn’t move right. This is sad, 'cause given the hype, this could’ve been a breakout role for her.
Finally, I felt let down by the staging of the slaughter that closes this segment. As with the incidental lines referred to above, this is a case where Rodriguez’s loyalty to Miller’s original vision worked against the story. The extreme stylization of these shots, possibly pushed to lessen the impact of potential gore, and salve, however slightly, the sensitivities of some in the audience, dulled the impact of this scene. Like the need for a greater sense of Dwight, Gail and the Women of Old Town’s desperate need to destroy the evidence of Jack Rafferty’s death, this scene should have been pushed to the dramatic hilt, and gone far over the top, like Marv’s bloody rampage for clues in The Hard Goodbye. It should have been exhausting, bloody, and terribly real at moments, more akin to the long gun battle Sam Peckinpah ended The Wild Bunch than the puppet like bullet ballet we saw here. We literally needed to see [spolier]Manute and the Mobsters cut to ribbons here, gashes, blood, guts and all, with closeups of the Women (not only Gail and Dwight) howling in bloodthirsty joy. As it was, someone really should have spent more time rehersing the women posted on he rooftops in how to hold their weapons more convincingly, bracing the weapons on thier bodies. Further, here of all places, we need to see RED spilled blood, and not the stylized white paint we saw in it’s place. [/spoiler]This should have come off as an Godawful holocaust (and perhaps visual echoes of the Spartan’s slaughter of the Persians at Thermopylae to push the point.) As it was, it didn’t - and too many people in the audience behind me tittered and giggled in response.
Finally we come to my favorite of Frank Miller’s Sin City tales, That Yellow Bastard. Here we run into another case where Bruce Willis’, Miller’s or Rodriguez’s stylistinc choices took away from the final film. First off, there was Willis (or someone’s choice to have Willis) so strongly emulate Humphrey Bogart’s performance of film noir cops, detectives and gangsters of sixty years ago. While I have to say it was the finest imitation of Bogart’s mannerisms, delivery and style that I have ever scene, unlike the way that Rourke imitated Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, instead of serving the film (as Rourke’s did), Willis created an iconic hero, whose style was well past it’s period of currency. We needed a much more naturalistic, contemporary performance here, to engage the audiences sympathy more fully. Willis can be a great actor (I’ve heard he’s amazing in Hostage, but paradoxically his great skill works against him here.
Compounding matters was Nicky Stahl’s make up, when he returns as the far too well connected serieal rapist. The look was just too distracting, and made it very hard to view The Yellow Bastard as the threat he’s intended to be, instead of merely freakish. We should have been terrorized from the moment he manages to get Nancy away from Hartigan, instead we never really see him as a real threat, not until he’s whipping Nancy in the barn, a scene that likewise should have been pushed. We simply never were scared enough for her safety to care, something very necessary to lend Hartigan’s sacrifice meaningful at this sequences end.
Finally, at the risk of overstating the case, however fine a hip-hop style performer, Jessica Alba’s, (an actress I very much want to like) delivery of key lines falls as flat as Jaime King’s in the Marv sequence. The problem is, her role is ten times more important here. Alba needed to make us believe in Nancy’s adolescent crush/love for Hartigan, … in the scenes she tries to seduce the man she’s been building up in her memory to a near demi-God of salvation and safety, and later, when she’s screaming defiantly at Stahls’ Yellow Bastard. Like King, she was fine physically (I still maintain she should’ve been given an extended dance sequence in which to shine), but the moment she opened her mouth, her delivery failed Hartigan’s story, and the film as a whole.
My problems with The Customer is Always Right. had to do with casting. For those familiar with the Colonel (called the Salesmen in the credits), and his role in this story, but more importantly, in the Blue Eyes stories to follow. Josh Harnett may be a very good actor (I am totally unfamiliar with his other work on the screen), but I could not help but feel he is far too young for the part. He could be one of the Colonel’s men, someone who seduces female targets before killing them. Not only must the Colonel come off as easy on the eyes for the women in Miller’s world, or for the women he recruits and trains for his bloody, brutal business; the man should come off as an experienced (and older) assassin, with possibly a hint of military experience. (Think Edward Fox.) Here I would have preferred Clive Owen, anyone that comes off as having a few years under his belt on the battlefields, overt or covert, of the world. (Actually, if Harnett is a good actor, I would have switched the two actors, having one play the others role… though the role of the Colonel, may well have been too small for Owen - an actor I like very much, see: Croupier - at this point in his career.)
The same critique applies to the casting of the Customer,: Marley Shelton doesn’t have the years (or sadly, possibly the skill) to easily, and quickly convey the crazed world weariness and desperation this short-lived character should embody. “The Woman in Red, at the End of Her Tether”, should convince us at first glance that there’s a lifetime of soul-destroying compromise packed into her luscious frame, and death’s waiting for her just around the corner, and she knows it. Hiring the Colonel should be an act of mercy (first and foremost for herself), even sacrifice (foreshadowing Hartigan’s) and I got no sense of that here. (Think Susan Hayward, in I Want to Live!).
As for Alexis Bledel, who plays Becky… … the Betrayer, soon to become Blue Eyes, if Sin City does well enough for a sequel to be “greenlit”, ,… I thought her perfectly cast as Becky, but she doesn’t convey the madness that should be obvious, dancing inside those blue eyes of hers. (Think “Crazy, if Sexy, Bitch”.) Well see how radically she’s changed in the sequel, assuming Sin City makes enough money in the weekends to come.
[/ul]I realize I’ve been harsh as all hell in my review above. It’s a result in my deep wish that this would be the film to break the wave of negative criticism I’ve seen written about comic book based films to date, and re-energive the faithful adaptation of more provocative source material. I wish I could say this was the case, and I still hope the adaptation(s) make piles of money, but it simply isn’t the success I’d hoped for.
Admittedly I’ve drawn fire for this review elsewhere: friends argued it betrayed too great a familiarity with the source material: thoughts folks?
