Four stories are unfolding over one night in Basin City, all of which will emphasise why it's been nicknamed Sin City. In the book-ending "The Customer Is Always Right," the Salesman (Josh Hartnett) meets the Customer (Marley Shelton) on a balcony and lulls her into a false sense of security with a kiss before shooting her with a silenced gun, saying as he then leaves that in the morning he will cash the cheque she gave him. Later, he returns disguised as a doctor to lure a more unsuspecting casualty in.
Next in "That Yellow Bastard," aging cop John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is battling through angina as he continues his quest to find and kill serial child killer Roark Junior (Nick Stahl) before his fourth captive, eleven-year-old Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), is raped and murdered. It doesn't help that Junior's father (Powers Boothe) is a hugely corrupt senator who's bribed the police to cover his son crimes up. When Hartigan finds Nancy and discovers she's grown up to be a stripper he rescues her from Roark Junior, but when she then expresses her love for him he must make a hard sacrifice for them both.
Thirdly in "The Hard Goodbye," ex-con Marv (Mickey Rourke) is having a one-night-stand with bombshell Goldie (Jaime King) before he wakes the next morning to find she's been murdered in her sleep. Against the advice of his lesbian parole officer Lucille (Carla Gugino), a furious Marv flees the scene before the cops arrive and then interrogates several informants to learn who ordered the murder: the Roarks. He then visits their farm where he encounters the culprit, the cannibal Kevin (Elijah Wood, of all people), who's also captured Lucille. After some crooked cops kill her, Marv interrogates them to discover Cardinal Patrick Roark (Rutger Hauer) organised Goldie's murder. He then heads to Old Town, the red light district, where Goldie's sister Wendy (also Jaime King), whom he earlier thought he'd seen as an hallucination, captures him, thinking he did it. After convincing her he didn't, they return to the farm to settle scores before Marv is finally sent to prison and put on death row.
Finally in "The Big Fat Kill," Shellie's (Brittany Murphy) ex Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) and his cronies are abusing her and flee when her boyfriend Dwight (Clive Owen) violently warns him to stop it. Jackie Boy and his mob now go to Old Town with Dwight in pursuit, and when Jackie abuses young prostitute Becky (Alexis Bledel) in the presence of Dwight, prostitute leader Gail (Rosario Dawson) and her martial artist expert offsider Miho (Devon Aoki), a bloody street war erupts. Numerous mercenaries try to defuse the situation but they are all shot dead, before an injured Becky escapes.
Sin City must be one of the most distinctive and groundbreaking films of this century so far. Based on Frank Miller's edgy graphic (in more ways than one) novel series, he and co-directors Robert Rodriguez and (for one scene) Quentin Tarantino established a melding of their minds to somehow make these four stories mesh. (Rodriguez even quit the Directors Guild of America to make it with Miller because they forbade him from doing so.) The result is simply breathtaking: immensely violent and gratuitous, certainly, but also beautiful and meticulously detailed. This is especially thanks to the very bold and exquisite colour processing, black and white with selected objects in specific colours, used for consistency with the source material and to emphasise good from bad. Rodriguez' editing and particularly photography (he shoots and cuts all his own films) bring this aesthetic's uniqueness out even more; the cinematography is utterly Oscar-worthy, in fact.
The performances are all dynamic, too, as characters much more layered and observed than usual for this kind of comic book pulp fiction. Just focusing on the majors: Willis inverts his iconic supercop role John McClane into a committed but very haggard man who probably should've handed his cop badge in a few years ago. Wood, straying as far from Frodo Baggins as possible, shows great relish and physical energy as the flesh-eating Kevin, Dawson sinks her teeth equally enjoyably into Gail and Owen convinces all the way as what could've otherwise been just another protective boyfriend role. But surely it's Mickey Rourke who steals the show. However little his part must've challenged him, his authority and comic timing here are just blistering.
Without this 2005 adaptation of Sin City, we probably wouldn't have seen those of V for Vendetta, Watchmen or 300 et cetera. I really think it sparked that chain of live-action Hollywood takes on graphic novels, for better or worse. None of the others can hold a candle to it, either, and nor can the 2014 sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. That one's all bark and no bite, but not even it can diminish its flawless predecessor.
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