Film Reviews

Sin City

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Bruce Willis
• Details: US / 124 mins (18s).

An amalgamation of three of Frank Miller's serialisations (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard), Sin City is arguably the finest big-screen comic-book adaptation yet. Miller's fictional Basin City is as nightmarish as film noir gets, and this deliriously OTT depiction contains gritty, hard-hitting and occasionally stomach-churning stuff. The first section finds a practically simian low-life, Marv (Mickey Rourke), 'killing his way to the truth' in pursuing the assassins of the one woman (Jaime King) who's ever offered him any kind of affection; that section segues into the third (in an elliptical, Pulp Fiction-style narrative), which features Bruce Willis as a disgraced cop determined to achieve redemption by tracking down the jaundice-faced psychopath (Nick Stahl) who preys on underage girls. Highly stylised in order to convey the stark chiaroscuro of Miller's drawings, the occasional splashes of colour only emphasise the black-and-white moral absolutes of Basin City: "Sometimes," the disillusioned Hartigan (Willis) muses, "the truth don't matter like it oughta." Unfortunately, the middle section, featuring Clive Owen on a mission to protect Uzi-toting hookers (!) sags; Owen simply doesn't convey the same sense of menace exhibited by Rourke or the vulnerability Willis displays on his lonely quest. But for anyone who loves the shadows, femme fatales, voice-overs, moral ambiguity and laconic quippery of classic noir, this is a must.

Review by Declan Burke