Review of Sin City

It is true: Sin City is the most faithful adaptation of a comic or graphic novel to date. And yet, and yet… Back in the old days, about a decade ago, comic-book movies were not respectable, Joel Schumacher hammering the last nails in the coffin. And then the renaissance: Unbreakable (not an adaptation, unless you count the steal from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol), the Spider-Man movies, and Hulk (most people thought that fell badly between two stools – too artsy for the explosions crowd, too explosive for the artsy crowd – but I love it). These were movies giving us what we loved about comics. And now here comes Sin City, essentially Frank Miller's work converted directly from page to screen. Which is the movie's biggest problem. In their heroic efforts to stay faithful to the source material, Miller and Rodriguez seem to have missed a rather banal truism: movies are not comic books. What worked so well on paper does not necessarily succeed on film (or computer, as the case may be). On paper, the whole thing is literally two-dimensional, and the stylisation is pretty much the raison d'etre. But when you actually get real people (well, actors, at any rate) saying the lines and doing the things the characters do, this brings a whole new level of meaning to light. The graphic novels could get away with the violence and the stock situations (clichés, if you like) and the intense misanthropy because they were firmly rooted in a particular kind of pulp fiction. But if you start looking at Sin City the movie in the context not of comic books but of other movies, what were once virtues now look horribly like flaws. In a movie with so many characters, and fine actors, it's a shame that only two of them (Marv and Hartigan) are anything other than cardboard cutouts – and in both those cases, the depth of character comes more from their thoughts rather than their actions. Both of these stories involve violent revenge and the search for redemption through the love of a beautiful blonde. The middle story involves… ah, I got bored at this point… gun-toting prostitutes… feminism's not my strong point but alarm bells were ringing at the idea of women who seem fully in control of their own lives and yet choose to be sleazy hookers… which gets me thinking about Nancy – was there any particular reason, plot-wise I mean, that she had to be a table-dancer and not, say, a law student? You can get away with these things in comics but in the cold light of cinema it all starts to seem a bit adolescent. As for the male characters, there is, intriguingly, rather a lot of crotch-related violence. Oh the violence. Again, a still image of violence is one thing, but on screen it careers between too-real and too-cartoony. "I didn't scream, Hartigan", breathes Nancy after getting a sound whipping from a psycho. Good for you, love, they could have done with you back in Billy Budd's time.

Which is not to say I hated the film. I did quite like most of it. I haven't addressed the technical aspects here, because I think it goes without saying that Sin City is technically brilliant. There is a time and place for style over substance, though, and while I hate to admit it, I think possibly that at 34 I'm getting too old for this sh*t.