Basin City Blues

Sin City is a lurid, roiling mass of anger, revenge, violence, and monochromatic eye-candy. It’s tough as nails, it’s funny as hell, and somehow it’s disarmingly moving.

The story opens on the balcony of a high-rise apartment. A forlorn beauty stares out over the city, as lost as a red dress in a gray-scale world. A dapper young man approaches her, offers her a cigarette, and as he lights it her eyes flash from gray to green, then back to gray as the flame is extinguished. It’s not a new technique, splashing color against a gray palette. Abel Glance did it as far back as 1927 in “Napoleon”, Jacques Tati in 1949 with “Jour de Fête”. It’s effective, even so, and fits the feeling and motion of Sin City very well. The city looms, gray above all else, a sprawling monstrosity; but it’s the glimpses of color, in their sparsity, that give it life, that make the stories.

And so we are given, much like glimpses of color, glimpses of story; which is to say, vignettes. And while it’s not immediately clear how these disparate characters tie together, and it’s not an incredibly strong bond even by the end, they do so in such a way that the soul of the city seems clear. It’s dark and it’s murky, but in the end it’s the hero (or anti-hero) of the story more than any of its denizens. The players come upon us suddenly, and some leave just as quickly. Only the city is constant, and it’s its history, and its conflicts, and its rulers and its discretions, that interests us. In this regard, the vignettes serve us well, as we are allowed to see the city from different perspectives, each with its own unique feel and rhythm.

As our main players; Micky Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Clive Owen each do an outstanding job. Rourke plays an ogre named Marv, and of the three is the most likable to a comic book super-hero, if in a bleak and violent way. He’s no Superman, but could easily be likened to The Punisher, but bigger and with fewer guns. Marv is a street-tough goon who downs prescription pills by the bottle, and who sets himself on a grim mission of revenge when he wakes up next to the corpse of the only woman who ever treated him well, even if she was only the angel of a single evening. Of the three, this story packs the most comedic element, as well as the most traditional comic-book style violence. It almost contains the most nudity, though I assure you this was not a factor in my saying that it was probably my favorite segment. Rather, I enjoyed Marv’s tough-as-nails, take-no-shit demeanor and penchant for grim repartée, not to mention his sense of old-school honor and respect for the only beautiful thing he’d ever known.

Bruce plays an over-the-hill cop with a “bum ticker”, named Hartigan. This segment is the most akin to the film-noir detective story, and of the three is the most a love story, though it also contains, in my opinion, the most grotesque imagery the movie has to offer. Having rescued a young girl from an ignoble fate, Hartigan is laid up and shortly after, dishonestly thrown in the slammer. He rots there for eight years, and is released only to emerge back into the same nightmare of a story that he left. He achieves resolution, though it’s no happy ending, to be sure.

If you love Clive Owen like some people I know love Clive Owen, then you’ll certainly enjoy his story in this movie as yet another grim, tough-as-nails hero. And even if you don’t like Clive Owen, you’ll probably appreciate Benicio Del Toro’s roll as a dead-but-still-jeering head. This segment does the most to exhibit the city’s dark underbelly, and explains a bit of the wary tension between the lower and upper crusts. My favorite part of this segment was Miho, a full-on kick-ass ninja prostitute. Oooh, what she does with those swords …

I’ve tried not to spoil it. Though the allure of the movie lies in its grim visuals and unapologetic explosions of violence, in the end the story is the thing. As a whole, the movie gets a full four stars from yours truly, though I suggest that if you watch it, you do so in a big theater with a good sound system. A movie like this demands to be big and loud, much like the city it portrays.