Sin City: Review
Sin City is set in a retro-future urban sprawl with a forested hinterland in which creepy blade-toting sickos turn innocent people into tagliatelli - a quasi-LA from both the 1940s and the present day, with automobiles of confusingly various vintage zooming up and down its pitch-black highways. People have cellphones, but the men unselfconsciously use the quaint term "dames".
Everything is constructed digitally and composed in a starkly defined monochrome on which splashes of lurid colour show up like wounds. Someone's eyes, or their lips, or their sneakers, or more probably their blood, are lividly painted on to the Weegee-photo-style black and white. Rodriguez splatters that claret around like Jackson Pollock, but sometimes it's not red but an expressionist molten yellow, and often a gunshot wound will show up glowing white, as if transformed into a splodge of radioactive birdcrap.
The action breaks down into three stories, the first and third creepily echoing each other's tale of an older man having a fascination for a younger woman who in turn has a deeply improbable tendresse for him. Under a massive facial prosthetic - almost certainly not a postmodern joke at the expense of his own cosmetic surgery - Mickey Rourke plays Marv, an ugly tough guy. He's the beast whose beauty is a prostitute who takes pity on him and gives him the night of his life, gratis. But she is killed by a psycho with a disturbing resemblance to Spiderman's alter ego, Peter Parker, and enraged by the subsequent cover-up involving politicians, cops and even the church, Marv goes on an orgiastic killing spree in the name of vengeance.
Marv's counterpart is Hartigan, a police officer on the verge of retirement played by Bruce Willis, who like Marv is on medication, in his case for an ironically failing heart. On his last day on the job, Hartigan submits to a three-quarter-life crisis and throws away the rule book in his grim determination to nail a crazed madman. Exactly like Marv's enemy, this vicious killer is a well-connected little punk, and like Marv, the righteous Hartigan gets a frame-up and a jail sentence. But the person whom Hartigan is trying to save is an 11-year-old girl who in a very queasy scene thanks her protector for saving her life and her virginity and grows up to be a slinky babe, played by Jessica Alba, who sets about seducing him.
Edited from: The Guardian, Friday 3 June 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment