Comic-book world of 'Sin City' gleefully revels in a disturbing gorefest

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

With a paltry $40 million budget, "Frank Miller's Sin City" would seem to be a minor player in the Hollywood scheme of things, but it's positioned to be the event film of the spring, perhaps even -- as Entertainment Weekly suggests on a recent cover -- "the Next PULP FICTION."

FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY

GRADE: F

The film tells three stories (with a fourth vignette as a framing device): Willis battling a child-molesting monster; Rourke as an ugly hulk out to avenge a girlfriend's murder; and Owen as a private eye helping a band of imperiled hookers.

The three segments transpire more or less in sequence (with some confusing overlapping) and all take place in Sin City: a super-corrupt, super-violent, super-shadowy, and in every other way super-exaggerated caricature of a '40s Hollywood film-noir world.

No one is going to confuse this world with reality. The heroes shake off multiple gunshot wounds, devastating blows to the head and other lethal overtures like slaps on the cheek; the hookers all look like Victoria's Secret models; the scenes are pure fantasy.

And, to be fair, the stylish blend of CGI- exoticism and non-stop mayhem generates a certain visual fascination. But the movie can't sustain it, and after the first segment it's hard to imagine how anyone could find its trashy excess anything but tedious and repulsive.

Everything that happens in the movie is a deliberate cliché, the stories have little narrative drive or interest, the dialogue is banal pseudo-Raymond-Chandler drivel and the performances are as shallow and posturing as the goofiest "SNL" skit.

Rodriguez is arrogantly proud of the way his movie so faithfully bows to the "genius" of Miller and re-creates his comic-book world with the same kind of religious devotion Gus Van Sant paid to Hitchcock with his frame-for-frame "Psycho" remake.

But is this a good thing? Does he really consider a case of arrested development like Miller a "genius?" Is comic-book art some superior aesthetic that deserves such tribute? Aren't movies already enough like dumb comic books without actually trying to BE one, shot-for-panel?

Though it's not immediately obvious, "Sin City" is a comedy, and its aspiration is to pull off the Tarantino trick of making its audience guffaw at the sheer outrageousness of its sadism at the same time it subtly gets off on it sexually.

And it's out to out-do Tarantino by reveling in the pornography of brutality on a scale never before attempted, a giddy spectacular in which we sit back like Romans at the Coliseum watching people being decapitated, disemboweled, dismembered, castrated and humiliated.

Owen says the movie has "tremendous wit," and the scene that got the biggest laugh at the screening I attended shows Del Toro spitting out yellow water after he's been half-drowned in an unflushed toilet with feces bobbing against his face. Wit?

The advance publicity has made a big deal about what a "risky" commercial venture this is, and how heroic it was for Rodriguez to insist on putting Miller's name in the title and above his own in the directing credits. But this all reeks of the worst Hollywood insincerity.

For one thing, can anyone doubt that such a violent, low-budget movie with such a lineup of stars will make a ton of money? And by putting Miller's name out front, isn't Rodriguez rather cowardly shielding himself from the backlash? Hey, this is Miller's world, not mine.

Given the distance "Sin City" pushes the envelope to on sick movie violence, and given the recent Columbine-like massacres, such a backlash from the Christian right and other voices for movie censorship seems likely (and Rodriguez may even be hoping for it).

I don't support these voices for a minute: I don't believe in censorship and I don't think movies motivate mass murder. But I do think that a film like this, especially one made by a major director under the flag of artistic integrity, adds something ugly to the air for which critics must hold it accountable.

Sitting through the thing, watching scene after scene in which I was being asked to be entertained by the spectacle of helpless people being tortured, I kept thinking of those clean-cut young American guards at Abu Ghraib. That is exactly the mentality Rodriguez is celebrating here. "Sin City" is their movie.