SIN CITY (2005)

It's no secret that I love comic books. I also love a lot of comic book movies. However, despite how good stuff like the first two X-Men and Spider-Man movies were, I never had the experience of what I see in my head when reading comics translated to screen until I was sitting in a movie theater watching SIN CITY for the first time. Since then, it's still only happened a couple times but that's a big factor in why SIN CITY has always held such a special place in my heart.

Frank Miller was a god to me growing up. I remember vividly that my perception of what comics were and what they could be was changed forever when I first saw the end of the original SIN CITY comic series that Miller put out. I was a little kid in elementary school, my brother and I were being taken to visit Washington D.C., and we ended up breaking away from our grandparents when while we were stopped at a red light or something...I saw a comic book store. I did not even really know such a thing existed at that point in time. I was growing up in a shitty small town where my only access to comics was newsstands in town. The fact that there was a place filled with comics was a place I needed to be, whether my grandparents wanted me there or not. In the brief time between when I got a way and when I was grabbed and lifted out of the store, I remember seeing Marv in the electric chair in SIN CITY. My mind was blown. I had no idea you could do things like that in comics. In movies (many that I wasn't allowed to watch), sure...but up to that point in time, comics were always and only costumed heroes and villains locked in combat for morality or whatever. That's not to say that I didn't love that, but it certainly wasn't anything like real life. It was literally different universes from the one I lived in and that was the only way I could ever really think about them. Until that second. Seeing a page at the end of Frank Miller's opus. It changed my life. After that, it would be years (as well as me having access to my own resources) until I would see Frank Miller's SIN CITY ever again...but it was something that I never forgot. It stuck with me and I needed to revisit SIN CITY. When I did, I devoured those books in a way that I have with very few others, but they were absolutely seminal to my development.

Fast forward a bit and I hear that one of my favorite filmmakers (and a god to me throughout my adolescence), Robert Rodriguez, has convinced Frank Miller that it's time to bring SIN CITY to the screen. Miller had terrible experiences in Hollywood before returning to comics. With that, he brought any hope of further adaptation of his work to the screen with him. However, Rodriguez decided to shoot one of the short SIN CITY stories with panel comparisons interspersed throughout to Miller, which led Miller to believe that maybe his work could be faithfully translated to the screen after all. He was even tapped by Rodriguez to co-direct with him, as he was the only one who truly knew what SIN CITY was like.

All that manifested into what is the most faithful and nearly perfect adaptation of a comic book that I have seen, even around two decades later. Granted, yes, on the other side of that...I do feel like what Rodriguez did with SIN CITY ultimately kind of broke Hollywood filmmaking in a way. See, the way SIN CITY was able to look as perfect as it did with the absolutely star-studded cast that it had was by shooting almost all of it very quickly with empty greenscreen soundstages and filling everything in later, after he shot all his footage. What was not obvious at the time—but has since become something that drives me increasingly more insane with each passing year—is that this method can also be used incredibly lazily by lesser filmmakers without Rodriguez's skill or imagination. It has been exploited to a psychotic degree. One can't fault Rodriguez for that though. He was figuring out how to bring SIN CITY to life and he damn sure accomplished that.

The cast is stellar from top to bottom, especially for the time. Probably the biggest star involved has always been Bruce Willis and what he did as Hartigan is something that I appreciate more and more with each viewing and every passing year. He's almost the middle ground between the subdued, laconic performance Clive Owen gives as Dwight and the more over-the-top performance of Mickey Rourke as Marv. However, Rourke is one hundred percent the star of the show as far as I'm concerned. Apparently, Miller had to be convinced by Rodriguez to even see Rourke for Marv because of his only recollection of him being "the guy from 9 1/2 WEEKS" but I knew instantly upon hearing of his casting that he was perfect. The years in between Rourke's fall from the Hollywood elite and descent into abusing his body with substances and then further abuse from his second career as a boxer made him absolutely perfect for the role. You didn't have to do anything with his voice to make him sound just like how Marv sounds in my head. You didn't have to use much makeup to change up his appearance into the resident bruiser of Miller's SIN CITY. Plus, he's a good enough actor with enough of Marv already in his soul that he managed to take one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and not only do the character justice but elevate him into places I didn't even think could be treaded upon.

As I said though, the whole cast is terrific. The aforementioned performance by Owen is still my favorite from him. The performance by Benicio Del Toro is just wonderful. Brittany Murphy as Shellie, Rosario Dawson as Gail, Jessica Alba as Nancy...there just is not a weak link. Everyone absolutely owns their roles and even if I didn't mention them, they're great in this film.

SIN CITY really should come up more when we're discussing the great comic book movies. Especially in this day and age. The way that it manages to be so ballsy and challenging and even rather transgressive while also being a total crowd-pleasing blockbuster is something that other filmmakers should be taking notes on if Hollywood continues trying to mine every piece of comics history for adaptation to feed the public's appetite for it. Hell, we're at a time where there is so much to compare it to and still nothing really does compare to SIN CITY. Even the sequel couldn't (which is something that I really try to never bring up as it causes me pain). SIN CITY is as perfect as one could ever hope from an adaptation of comics or really any media. It just puts so many others absolutely to shame and stands head and shoulders above everything else like it.