Sin City (2005)

Sin City is fierce, adult stuff. Heads are severed (seven of them). Limbs are lopped off. Chunks are chomped out of necks, arrows thunk through faces, hands and scalps are shorn clean away. There’s beating, hanging, slashing, torture by whip and some seriously smarting eyeball and genital trauma.

But this is a shamelessly abstract world, and Robert Rodriguez revels in ripping up the rules of everyday physics in surrender to the exaggerated comicbook logic of co-director and Sin City author Frank Miller.

Characters leap from 5th-storey windows and land on their feet. They swan-dive down stairwells, spinning off bannisters. Hit by cars, they pirouette like gymnasts, thunking back to earth and asking for more.

It’s thrilling to see such a classy cast freed of all the standard restraints. Mickey Rourke in particular delivers a balls-out, born-again performance.

Rodriguez takes Miller’s profane urban patois and swashbuckling brushstrokes and ships it wholesale. The three Sin City graphic novels adapted here – The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard – aren’t just inspiration, they’re storyboards. Frames and sequences are recreated shot-for-shot. Dialogue is directly transposed.

Never before has a comic book’s entire soul been so faithfully, and successfully, ripped from page to screen.

Elijah Wood terrifies as a mute, cannibal, high-kicking Harry Potter. Bruce Willis, seedy and scarred, looks more at home being the stand-up guy than he did in the flaccid Hostage. Benicio del Toro is a cheap and nasty nemesis for Clive Owen’s dashing do-gooder, and Nick Stahl’s creepy ‘Yellow Bastard’ will linger long.

Yes, the women are decorative – either strutting around with all assets advertised or poured into gappy bondage garb. But there’s plenty of sass to go with the slink, particularly Rosario Dawson’s Gail, who protects her patch with a potent force of working-girl power.

Only Jessica Alba’s nightclub dancer Nancy is a true victim – but that’s precisely what drives the logic of her story.

This ain’t no treatise on sexual politics. It’s an unreconstructed, man’s man’s world where the guys are either sickly or borderline sicko, and the girls are classic noir femme fatales – both in distress and deadly.

The bar for future comic-book treatments has officially been raised. Rodriguez has de-geeked the graphic novel.

Nancy
Jessica Alba
Miho
Devon Aoki
Becky
Alexis Bledel
Senator Roark
Powers Boothe
Liebowitz
Jude Ciccolella
Gail
Rosario Dawson
Corporal Rivera
Jesse De Luna
Jackie Boy
Benicio Del Toro
Hitman
Jason Douglas
Manute
Michael Clarke Duncan
Brian
Tommy Flanagan
Judge
Christina Frankenfield
Klump
Rick Gomez
Lucille
Carla Gugino
The Man
Josh Hartnett
Cardinal Roark
Rutger Hauer
Juicer
David Hickey
Josie
Evelyn Hurley
Stuka
Nicky Katt
Goldie/Wendy
Jaime King
Maeve
Helen Kirk
Bob
Michael Madsen
Ronnie
Jason McDonald
Schutz
Clark Middleton
Priest
Frank Miller
Shellie
Brittany Murphy
Tammy
Lisa Marie Newmyer
Weevil
Tommy Nix
Shlubb
Nick Offerman
Dwight
Clive Owen
Marv
Mickey Rourke
Louie
Jeff Schwan
Roark Jr./Yellow Bastard
Nick Stahl
Assistant DA
Paul T. Taylor
Lenny/Benny
Scott Teeters
Nancy (age 11)
Makenzie Vega
Murphy
Arie Verveen
Dallas
Patricia Vonne
Hartigan
Bruce Willis
Kevin
Elijah Wood

Director
Robert Rodriguez