Sin City (2005) Dir: Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller

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I have wanted to watch this modern noir film, which was co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, and based upon the graphic novels by Miller, for some time. I hadn't seen all that much about it, but some of the shots I had seen looked very interesting from a cinematography perspective. The film also seems to have a steady fambase, which felt like a reasonable enough reason to check the film out too.

It was safe to say that this was a very heavily stylised comic book movie. It really went to extremes to resemble the graphic novel style from which it took its inspiration. It was certainly unique. I wanted to like the intense black and white comic book effects, but some of it looked truly awful. I think it almost got too extreme in its attempts to convey its unique style. I'm sure for some, it's exactly what they hoped for, but for me, it was kind of ugly.

It didn't help that the film was so poorly directed. Some of the shot selection was not great at all, especially some of the awkward green screen close-ups. It wasn't all bad though, I liked the consistent use of silhouettes, which made for some pretty memorable looking shots. There was clearly a definitive vision for what this film was supposed to look like, and I can respect the undoubted commitment to it, but it really could've looked, and been executed, better.

The 'Pulp Fiction'-like narrative was an interesting idea, which worked fairly well, aside from feeling a little cluttered. I can't deny I that I enjoyed the unpredictable way the film pitched from protagonist to protagonist - it definitely gave the film a feeling of stakes, and that the characters were not being protected by the plot. For a modern film noir, it didn't set the world ablaze, but it did the fundamental elements fine. Some of it got very cheesy, and, worse still, one of the character dynamics was extremely creepy and problematic. A lot of other aspects of the film were troubling too - there was a lot of blatant misogyny, for instance, but that aforementioned character relationship may have been the worst offender.

In regards to the main three actors, I thought that Clive Owen was the most interesting to watch. He had an intensity to his work that almost ventured too far into being cringe, but he kept it on the line enough to get away with it. Bruce Willis' acting wasn't bad either, but his performance definitely felt a little more artificial than Owen's. And then there was the controversial Mickey Rourke, whose performance was decidedly weak. Every action and word of his made me intensely aware that I was watching an actor playing a role, not a character speaking.

There were quite a few other characters to keep an eye on throughout this one, but the ones I liked the most, at least as far as the performances went, were Jessica Alba, Rutger Hauer, and Benicio del Toro. I also thought there were some other fairly decent performances from the likes of Elijah Wood, Alexis Bledel, Michael Madsen, and Nick Stahl as well, albeit I definitely wasn't as keen on them as those mentioned prior.

Overall, to call this film a mixed bag would be putting it lightly. There were some legitimately cool and interesting scenes throughout, but amongst all of that was a litany of amateur-looking camerawork, horribly problematic characters, a convoluted plot, and a whole lot of random scenes that seem to lead to not very much at all. This is a big old mess of a comic book film, which seems to be aging pretty poorly. There's a sequel to this, but I'm pretty divided about watching it. This first one is all over the place.