…yet made of stars

This may seem  odd, but it was impossible for me to watch Sin City without thinking about BBC’s six-hour adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I know—it’s a bit of a leap from gang warfare and cannibalism to Victorian-era courtship (well—actually, now that I think about it, maybe not), but despite the obvious thematic difference, the adaptations are roughly the same, as far as I’m concerned.

If you’ve seen Pride and Prejudice—and, odds are, if you or someone you know is female, you have—you know it serves one purpose and one purpose only: to be a word-for-word screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In that respect, it’s successful, but a cynic such as myself can’t watch it without thinking, what’s the point? Viewers who want to experience Austen’s novel should simply be reading Austen’s novel, and filmmakers shouldn’t be wasting their time and energy reinventing the wheel. There’s also a degree of condescension inherent here—as though Austen’s novel wasn’t “complete” or “official” until it became a film (after all, the film adds nothing except the fact that, well, it’s a film).

Color...in a black-and-white film? Be still, my heart.

But maybe that’s just me. Frank Miller, the comic book artist behind the Sin City graphic novels, was directly involved in the film version, as co-director—so evidently, he believed in the project. Reportedly he had refused to even allow his novels to be adapted into films (after seeing Hollywood mangle the scripts he had penned for RoboCop 2 and 3) until he was assured that the adaptation would be completely faithful. And that’s what you have with Sin City: a shot-by-shot, line-by-line, remake of the graphic novels on which it was based. It’s never entirely clear why anyone felt the need to do this, other than possibly to save themselves the work of drawing up a storyboard. (I’ve heard the Pride and Prejudice adaptation justified on the grounds that people are simply too lazy to read books, but are people really too lazy to read comic books?)

But here it is, take it or leave it. The film unfolds as something of an anthology, with three main story arcs that sort of interweave but mostly don’t. Bruce Willis is an aging cop who is obsessed with protecting an 11-year-old who grows up to be a stripper (Jessica Alba), Clive Owen is a photographer trying to protect a district run by whores from organized crime (Alexis Bledel shows up to play a character that is essentially Rory Gilmore in fishnets), and Mickey Rourke is a generic thug looking for the killer of a prostitute (Jaime King). It all takes place within the fictional municipality of Basin “Sin” City, Washington, where the law is corrupt, and the individual finds his own justice through the barrel of a gun.

I am stuck on Band-Aid brand...

It’s all pulled off well enough, but this sort of thing has been done better before. Any film that does everything it can to evoke the mood of a film noir and then hands you a silly story about a cannibalistic cartel—with a straight face—clearly needs work. It’s also just too nihilistic for its own good. The fact that all of the characters are too corrupt to like (with the possible exception of the Willis character) doesn’t exactly help to absorb the viewer. If any of these stories had been made into a feature-length production, we might have come to sympathize with one of the characters eventually, but the episodes end too quickly to allow the viewer to get to that point. If you want, you could call it a study in what the world might be like if human greed and corruption were allowed to run unchecked, but it’s far to celebrative of its own sex and violence to be taken seriously at that level. At the end of the day, this is just sick, twisted stuff for sick, twisted stuff’s own sake.

The film is visually distinctive, to be sure. (Like the comics, the film is primarily black-and-white, but with highly effective punctuations of color sprinkled throughout. The majority of it was filmed in color in front of a green screen, then converted to black and white and set against a computer-generated background.) To be brutally honest, though, this is just a stunt, and nothing more. It’s simply not that impressive coming from a Hollywood studio that you know has more money than God and can use computers to make a film look however they want. In any case, a cool look just isn’t enough to sustain a two-hour film. See the film if you like the whole “sick-and-twisted-because-we-like-it-that-way” sort of shtick; if you’re in it for the visual aspect, just watch the trailer and call it good.