Sunday, April 03, 2005

Review: Sin City

Rob, Suzy and I caught an afternoon matinee of Sin City. The visual style was extremely powerful ... in fact, there wasn't much to the movie beyond that. It really was a transcription of the comic books to the screen ... but the over-the-top blood, violence, brutality and deviant fetishistic sex may not work so well on the big screen.

It did have quite a few good lines and wasn't exactly boring. I've only skimmed the comic books, but I got the feeling they crammed too much in. Too often, characters arrive, have a couple of lines of hackneyed conversation, and disappear (often in a splash of blood). I think I prefer a more controlled build up, where the potential of the combatants is established over the course of time, leading to a final confrontation ... Once Upon A Time In China did this quite well, for example, but in Sin City most of the characters are all but invincible (for example, shrugging off multiple gun shot wounds, or impacts from speeding cars) ... and that undermines any tension.

Suzy and my final take: Pretty entertaining for such a bad movie.