Sin City

All action comic book pastiches don’t come much better packaged than this one. Great cast, a co-director credit for Frank Miller for his wonderful artwork, a sequence directed also by Quentin Tarantino and a film that’s visually stunning to boot.

Rodriguez takes his cast into a computer generated galaxy of good guys and baddies, damsels in distress and women whose flair admirably matches their wild abandon and bite. It’s the world of Sin city where you live into your 40’s you’re probably lucky.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly Mickey Rourke, so fantastically made up as Marv, a hulk of a man, whose face becomes a glittering patchwork of plasters and a 7ft streetfighter with a heart of gold who has a penchant for taking dead man’s jackets. His performance is so good, it leaves Bruce Willis’s role as Hartigan, a cop whose body seems to be falling apart, firmly in the shade, but you’re never given a chance to relax as this film with breakneck speed introduces you to pretty ex-gumshoe Dwight, played by Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro playing twisted bad boy Jackie Boy, and Jessica Alba playing sexy dancer Nancy amongst many other colourful characters.

The real star here though is the visual flair used to shoot it. Rodriguez deserves the plaudits for capturing this world to a tee, and one gets the impression you need to see this film at least twice to pick up on all the detail. If there’s one criticism, its probably that many of the stories seem samey and some may also think the violence is a little OTT although personally I think this has to be slotted into the cartoon violence category and therefore can be taken with a pinch of salt.

Mostly its very entertaining for its inventiveness, its great cast and the fact that its easy to get swept away with the heroics – overall its like a comic book brought to life and the world of Sin city is boy’s own stuff whilst girls will appreciate the fact that girls like Nancy and Gail (Rosario Dawson), a brothel owner with attitude, get to kick ass too.

Matt Arnoldi