Sin City
Dimension Home Video

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A veritable live-action graphic novel, this breathtaking epic -- based on Frank Miller's hard-boiled comic series -- caters to comics fans, action movie lovers and indie flicksters equally. Like the electric Pulp Fiction a decade before it, Miller's ultraviolent big-screen adaptation is a cultural flashpoint with ambitious cinematography and irresistibly poetic film noir dialogue. If you squint your eyes, every frame of the movie -- co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and writer-illustrator Miller himself, with one scene (but which one?) helmed by Quentin Tarantino -- looks like actual black-and-white panels snipped from the graphic novels. Occasional dabs of color in bodily fluids such as blood and tears glow like sweat in those Gatorade commercials.

Based on Miller's novels titled Sin City, That Yellow Bastard and The Big Fat Kill, the movie comprises three interwoven stories set in the lawless metropolis of Basin City. Sadistically scarred biker Marv (Mickey Rourke) is framed for the murder of his true love (Jaime King) and goes on a rampage to avenge her death. Clive Owen is Dwight, a private eye who kills an abusive john that turns out to be a decorated cop; disposing of the body, with the help of the warrior-like hookers -- Rosario Dawson, Alexis Bledel and Devon Aoki -- poses some bloody obstacles. In the third story, Bruce Willis is Hartigan, a hard-boiled detective with a bum ticker, who takes the fall for a crime he didn't commit in order to save the young victim (Jessica Alba); his gesture pits them against the deformed son of Basin City's senator (Nick Stahl) and a lupine sociopath (Elijah Wood), in the ultimate showdown. Tough, sexy, ambitious and artful without being pretentious, Sin City is an instant classic that should appeal to anyone who can stomach the inventive carnage.

For a breakthrough movie of such beautiful technical finesse, the real sin of this DVD is that there isn't a multitude of technical extras and commentaries illustrating how director Rodriguez translated a series of minimalist green screen shots into a pulsing black-and-white metropolis. Aside from an alternative French language track and optional Spanish and English subtitles, this no-frills disc offers no bonuses beside an eight-and-a-half-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that shows how Rodriguez invited actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton to Austin to film the test reel before they even had the rights to the books. The resulting short film sold Frank Miller on the idea of letting them make a whole Sin City movie and serves as the feature's pre-credit sequence. To appeal to collectors, Dimension has packaged the movie in four different covers.

by Rob. Walton