IMDb #189 Review: Sin City (2005)

Source: Wikipedia

In Frank Miller's neo-noir wannabe Vegas, grittiness masquerades as realism, but pulls it off with such style it's tough to resist succumbing to entertainment.

The extended edition features several stories, told out of chronological order. They focus on different festering wounds of human morality, but feature the same bitterly heroic triumph. Hope you like end credits--you'll see 'em three times (four, counting a punchy short film). Acceptable, because the end credits theme is fantastic.

If you've read the graphic novels, it's practically a shot-for-shot adaptation. The same dudes get plugged from the same camera angles. The same cynicism chokes the atmosphere. The same dialogue sparkles with blindingly poetic polish. Frank Miller's obsession is still whores setting back feminism several centuries.

Like goodness in a horrible world, the modified black-and-white emphasizes splashes of color. Blood, fat red lips, more blood, and a certain deformed yellow midget (not a racist metaphor, probably). Optimism is crushed, beauty abused, nobility punished. Every vice you can imagine gets its moment in the spotlight, which falls off the lighting grid and shatters and showers the audience in scalding glass shards.

Some disparities stick out like broken thumbs. Such as reconciling the stylized violence with the purported realism. And portraying strong woman sexually -- such as the armed-to-the-teeth prostitutes of Old Town -- masks exploitation as empowerment. It just replaces one fantasy with another, admittedly cooler fantasy. Also, lady nipples are apparently Hollywood kosher, but male genitalia is a big wrinkly no-no.

Even if you despise the stories, the twisted characters are worth it. Talented actors portray these cartoons with such aplomb, it's mesmerizing, and almost believable. Too much verisimilitude would spoil the effect anyway.

124 minutes.