Sin City
Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, "kitchen sink"
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez, Tarintino pinch hitting.
Rating: 2.68/5.0
Where to begin, where to begin? When I first saw the trailer, I was very interested in seeing how this movie pans out. I read up on the story behind the movie, how Rodriguez gave up his director's guild membership to make Frank Miller a co-director, how Miller was very hands-on and the end result was going to be as direct a copy of the comic as it could. How Tarintino even came in to pinch hit for his first foray into digital film.
Notice I said copy, not translation. Remember that.
I saw the star-power being thrown behind it. A couple of heavy hitters(Willis, Owen, Wood, Del Toro), some smaller stars/starlets(Murphy(best performance), Alba(eye candy), Stahl(underrated), Clarke-Duncan(typecast), Dawson(Gilmore Girl gone wild), Hartnet("have you seen me lately?"), Madsen(career crushing)) and a couple of on-the-way-outers(Mickey Rourke("Yeesh"), and Rutger Hauer(That's Rutger Hauer?). Pretty impressive on the marquee there.
With such talent and a pretty decent story, you'd think that this would be a grand slam. But it's not. And may become famous in cinema textbooks of the most clear-cut example of why you don't allow the writer on the set.
I understand Miller's/Rodriguez's goal of making the movie as faithful to the text as possible, but cannot follow instructions to build a "boat", when you're making a "house"! I'm not an autuer or some famous writer of any medium, so what I say next could easily be refuted(and since this is a blog, I say go for it), but I'm going to say it anyway.
In writing, it is often required to crack open the head's of the characters and spill their thoughts out. Especially since it is not a medium where actions are as clearly received as in film. Comics work somewhere inbetween text and film, where extended thought can be conveyed without disruption of scene, character, or pacing.
That being said, having a comic book read to me during a movie is about as aggravating as having a comic book read to me during a movie. Tami had this to say.
"When I interviewed at the NSA, every room had a flashing red light to indicate an outsider in the midst. For 8 hours, they'd quiz you on material. I'd rather go through that and have bamboo shoved under my cuticles for a week than watch that movie again."
Sitting through all the mental dialogue is just excrutiating. I owe Tami 5 chic flicks because of that movie(actually, just 5 of whatever she wants, now), and I would gladly sit through them if it meant not seeing it again. And were it just the mental dialogue, we could let it go with that and get on to the good things. But like Basin city, no one has a happy ending.
In addition to the mind numbing voiceovers and semi-voiceovers, some of the lines(while revealing and choice for the characters on pulp) are just nails-on-chalkboard on the screen. I appreciate stylization as much as the next guy, but this wasn't even good stylized dialogue. It was stylized comic book dialogue, which just doesn't work coming out of flesh-and-blood mouths.
To their credit, some actors managed to pull it off. Brittany Murphy had her character spot-on and pulled-off any cheeseball line she had. She also seemed the least two-dimensional of the characters portrayed. Clive and Bruce come in second with theirs, although the fact that they had more screen time than most was probably a factor. Stahl was a close third only because he had such little time on screen compared to the second placers. Josh Hartnett, for once, actually impressed me with his performance enough to merit a high placing, kudos, Josh. The rest are as you might expect, but lets look at the bottom of the list, shall we?
Benicio Del Toro could very well be the victim of bad directing and/or editing, or maybe his character was just sadly underdeveloped. Let's take it Doonesbury-style. Replace Benicio's character with a floating, talking bottle of Aristocrat vodka. Not only is this funny when he's being drowned or when Dwight has his "cap" by the hair, but it pretty much sums up the character. "hello, I'm a drunk bad cop. Booga Booga!" The post-mordem scenes with him in the car are amusing, but not enough to gain my interest.
Mickey Rourke, my god. I don't know if it was the lines, the delivery, or the bad wire work all around him, but watching him(although devout to the comic) was like watching Paul Newman beat the tar out of Mike Tyson in bare-knuckles boxing. His makeup was awesome, he was built for a man of his age, but something about the way his environment responded around him, even for something stylized and exaggerated, just seemed off. When he was drowning the guy in the crapper for info, the wirework was holding up the guy higher than he was. There goes my suspension of disbelief...
Some of the action sequences, while mirroring the comic book faithfully, just looked wrong. Not stylized, overstylized, or hokey, just wrong. People flipping too slow for such an arc of travel. Stuff like that.
Marv's story is the only one I've read and, word-for-word is directly copied onto the screen. This is quite an accomplishment for a movie, granted, but so were the special effects for "Independence Day" and I don't hear anyone harping over that one these days. It takes more than faith to source for a movie to be good.
But let's ease up on it and go over what it did do right. First off, faith to source. With the writer as a co-director, I doubt you could more faithful to the source than this.
The cast is spot-on, each actor was well placed(perhaps too well in some cases) and very capable of handling the job at hand.
Robert Rodriguez? He's no Kurosawa, Hitchcock, or Demille by any drug-induced stretch of the imagination, but he also isn't bad either. I have some questions concerning organization and editing. Then again, with three directors(himself, Miller, and Tarintino) having fingers in the pot, I guess it's fortunate that they didn't end up with another AI.
The visual special effects (minus wirework and CGI animation(not rendering, mind you) on some action sequences)) were what made the movie. The shadowing, sihillouetting, and use and omission of color was just plain slick.
Overall, this movie had the potential to be the spring hit of the year, but I think part of the ideal they pursued also cursed them. As romantic and noble as it sounds to have the writer on the set giving input and direction on the film's look, feel, and behavior, they just seem out of place. It's like taking an exacto knife to a knife fight. Sure it'll do the job and in the right situations, do very very well, but you really want a machete. The constant barrage of thought dialogue was just too tedious to endure for such a period of time.
Truly sad that I got my hopes up about that film. I wonder how Star Wars will faire next month?
Posted by Jeffrey at April 17, 2005 12:54 AM