Sin City Review
by Steve Rhodes (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)April 26th, 2005
SIN CITY
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
Watching SIN CITY, along with my large and nearly comatose audience, who were clearly anything but entertained, gave me an intense sense of sadness, not about the story but about the movie and what it says about the current state of the motion picture industry. This lifeless film, which is based on "a graphic novel," i.e. a hyper-violent brand of comic book, is never about anything other than its look. Filmed exclusively against a blue screen, the backdrops were all computer generated. The resulting cinematography had the colors stripped out, leaving only blacks and whites. Some color was then reintroduced, especially lots of red blood. The result, as it was in the similar appearing SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, is a stylized and lifeless depiction of humanity.
The only notable attribute of the film, other than its appearance, is its preoccupation with violence, lots and lots of gratuitous violence. This NC-17 movie, which the once again brain dead MPAA gave an R rating, disturbed some of the younger members of our audience, especially a three year old who didn't like seeing human heads smashed like pineapples with baseball bats and dogs eating the guts from barely alive victims. Even if everyone in the audience had long since graduated from college, it would still have been extremely sad to me to see viewers paying good money to view this violent pornography on the screen.
The script didn't make me sad, but it almost made me laugh, since it has so many clichéd lines that it sounds like it was generate by a computer, and who knows, maybe it was. It features lots of "dames," "broads," "dolls," and "fall guys" in just about every other sentence. I guess it is supposed to be so cheesy that it would be fun to laugh at. But fun was something I never had in SIN CITY, no matter how many stars it had. I found it about as enjoyable as being bludgeoned to death, which was exactly how I felt when I finally left to again breathe the fresh air of real life, 126 long minutes later.
SIN CITY runs 2:06. It is an NC-17 movie which the MPAA has rated R for "sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue" and would be acceptable for college kids and older.
The film is playing in nationwide release now in the United States. In the Silicon Valley, it is showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: [email protected]
***********************************************************************
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
