Sin City
June 8th, 2005
I went to see Sin City at the Duke of York on Saturday night. There’d been a preview in the Sunday Times last week that had looked good so my expectations were high. I wasn’t disappointed: it was excellent.
In tone the movie is somewhere between Pulp fiction and Seven, with the oozing cool and multi-layered story telling of the former and the psychologically twisted engine of the latter. It’s moody, dark and very messy. So messy that I think the gore would’ve be too much if it were realistically represented, but in the stylish monotone of the movie what would be gouts of pumping red are shown instead as sopping white, occasionally giving the impression that the protagonists had suffered some sort of homicidally escalated disagreement over the decorating. It might be from a comic, but for fans of Spiderman it ‘aint.
In fact, let’s compare it to Spiderman for a moment, with its superficially similar comic book origins. In Spiderman we’re asked to believe that the action occurs in our world. That everything is as per our everyday existence except for when the plot requires the laws of physics to be arbitrarily broken. This happens a lot in Spiderman and in these moments I find myself snapped out of my absorption in the movie, shaking my head. For this reason in particular, I hated Spiderman. It failed to create a credible, internally consistent world where the plot was the result of events, not the other way around.
Sin City has plenty of physically outrageous moments: you don’t get hit by a car three times then dust off your coat and head to the nearest bar, for instance. But the difference is that Sin City doesn’t try to be reality. It’s not our world so suspending disbelief is easy for what is literally a cartoon made real. Now the only thing breaking my reverie is laughing-boy, two rows back, hooting like a moron at every slightly corny line. SHUT UP you ****, it’s not a ******* comedy!
And at the risk of this turning into a rant about cinemagoers, I have to confess that I had a go at a distractible five-year-old in Star Wars the other day. Don’t mess with my Star Wars, man. Don’t mess with my cinema. The worst single thing that can happen to me in the cinema is having my belief in the film broken – be it by distraction or by a literally in-credible plot.
Sin City succeeded by continually surprising me, by being uncompromisingly adult, and by not treating me like an idiot. More of this please – recommended.