Rodriguez's approach is not to make the movie version of the Sin City comics, but to make a Sin City comic that happens to be a movie. The look and feel are so faithful to the books, and the photography so beautifully done, that the books actually seem unnecessary by comparison. Miller's darkly funny, unflinching writing is not for everyone, but this film manages to actually elevate the Sin City comics to a level of seeming literary importance that belies the pulp wankery they sometimes were. Watching the film, it's hard not to feel like Miller's books are Great Literature, because they sure make for Great Cinema. The film is bloody as hell, amoral to the point of pure sarcasm, and consistently surprising. Everyone takes way more bullets than is humanly possible, and the decapitations are fast and furious. But where Kill Bill simply fetishized these types of things, Sin City just plays with them deliriously, as though, like, someone getting an arrow through their midsection is just a humorous everyday occurrence we can all relate to. Which apparently is the case if you live in Sin City.
The cast is amazing—virtually everyone in the film is famous, and everyone's playing against type, in roles that are frequently little more than cameos. It's all too rare these days for a film to use actors not for box-office draw but for color and texture. This liberates the cast to do, across the board, their best possible work. Everyone's good, though I'll single out Mickey Rourke as Marv for having the biggest "Wow!" factor. Rordiguez not only radically reimagined how one would typically cast "Mickey Rourke," but also clearly gave the guy a part he could really relish performing. When Mickey Rourke enjoys his work, we all win. Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer play corrupt brothers – both are terrific and extremely welcome. Clive Owen is great, as is Rosario Dawson (and/or Rosario Dawson's leather outfit, I'm not sure whether I can differentiate the two). Elijah Wood is B-A-N-A-N-A-S in a completely un-Frodo sort of way. Brittany Murphy, surprisingly, is note-perfect. Hell, even Josh Hartnett manages not to fuck things up.
And on and on. It's just great shit all around. Though it's most definitely a cult film, it's a big one, and represents Robert Rodriguez's most impressive leap forward yet. He still may not be making "important" movies in the critical sense (the Academy's complete freeze-out of Sin City is duly noted), but damn if he hasn't been quietly establishing a totally new paradigm for how movies can be, or perhaps should be, made. The surface glitz of Sin City all but obscures that this is a film that genuinely pushes the art of film forward (as I'm sure "guest director" Tarantino humbly discovered when trying to play by Rodriguez's rules … Tarantino might as well be an aspring teenage "graphic novelist" curating the MoMA). Rodriguez's films consistently make me wonder how much further movies can go in the CG era … everyone thought The Matrix was the be-all-end-all back in '99, then came The Lord of the Rings, which almost made The Matrix look dated. Sin City, once more, shows us shit we've simply never seen before. And Robert Rodriguez is only still improving? And he's doing more Sin City movies? Shit, man, I might have to buy some diapers for the next one.
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