The first twenty-five years of 21st-century cinema have largely been dominated at the box office by comic book movies. While superheroes overshadow almost everything else that comes out of the comic book medium, Frank Miller’s Sin City is a rare example of a non-superhero title breaking into the mainstream.
Miller made his mark in the comic book industry with his seminal runs on Marvel’s Daredevil and his transformative take on DC’s Batman in The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. By 1991, Miller began telling his own stories in Sin City, a black-and-white crime noir comic book that attracted older readers, including director Robert Rodriguez.
Rodriguez was such an ardent fan of the comic that he secured the rights to adapt Sin City for the big screen, and he invited Miller to take a direct role in the creation of the film. On April 1, 2005, Sin City opened in theaters and briefly turned Hollywood’s attention away from superheroes with its $158.7 million worldwide gross against a $40 million budget.
Twenty years later, Sin City is more of an aberration than a harbinger of things to come. Yet while Hollywood’s obsession with comic books focused mostly on superpowers and spandex, the film showcased all the creative possibilities of the genre and how it can appeal to more than just teenage boys.
Welcome to the Big City
Like the comic book that spawned it, Sin City takes place in a fictional location called Basin City, a city that is mired in darkness and corruption. In this town, most of the cops are dirty and the criminals play for keeps. The only justice that anyone gets in Sin City is the retribution they take for themselves. And there’s rarely a happy ending in this world.
The film was split into multiple adaptations of Miller’s standalone stories, with an amazing ensemble cast including Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen, Alexis Bledel and Elijah Wood. These performers threw themselves into this world, and a few even let the makeup department transform them into their comic book counterparts as closely as possible, even when it meant adding uncomfortable prosthetic makeup to their faces.
The Visuals Are Amazing
Aside from the actors and their performances, the biggest draw in this movie is its incredible visuals. Many scenes seem as if they were lifted directly out of the Sin City comic. The film also retained the comic’s black-and-white aesthetic with limited uses of color throughout. Without giving any particular spoilers away, when you see color in this movie, it usually signifies something important.
Most superhero movie directors seem determined to drag the world of comic books down to our dull reality. Sin City makes the exaggerated nature of Miller’s visuals seem right at home in film without losing the look of the medium that inspired the movie. If Sin City were judged purely on looks alone, this film would be deemed a work of art.
It Brought Together Three Very Different Artists
Rodriguez made sure that Miller had a constant presence on set and that he had a say in how his creation was presented. However, when Sin City was about to be released with Miller and Rodriguez billed as co-directors, the Directors Guild of America refused to let them share the credit because of its archaic rules.
Miller reportedly turned down Rodriguez’s offer to take full credit, nor did the latter want to take all the credit himself. In the end, Rodriguez resigned from the DGA so he didn’t have to be bound by its rules. He and Miller were billed as co-directors, and Quentin Tarantino even got a special guest director credit for the wild scene he helmed. The scene in question featured Dwight McCarthy (Owen) having a conversation with a dead cop, Jack Rafferty (del Toro), while the former was attempting to dispose of the latter’s corpse.
Tarantino’s earlier films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs arguably inspired the tone for Sin City, so it was fitting that a small piece of the film was credited to him.
The Actors Bring a Human Touch to Their Over-the-Top Roles
Because of the nature of the stories being told in the film, none of the characters presented in it are what anyone would call “normal.”But the actors brought an innate humanity to their roles, with Bruce Willis’ Detective John Hartigan being a prime example of that much-needed human touch. Most of Willis’ action movie roles were behind him at this point, and that made him a terrific choice to embody Hartigan’s wariness and his single-minded drive to protect Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) at all costs.
Sin City also came out prior to Mickey Rourke’s big comeback in The Wrestler, but he’s perfect as the lumbering Marv, who is the closest thing this movie has to a hero besides Hartigan. Conversely, Wood is incredibly creepy as the silent serial killer named Kevin. That role was the opposite of Woods’ turn as the innocent Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice
Thanks to the success of Sin City, Miller was offered more opportunities to direct. The biggest solo project that Miller landed on was 2008’s live-action adaptation of The Spirit, a classic comic book by Will Eisner. Miller cast future Suits star Gabriel Macht in the title role and surrounded him with bigger stars, including Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson.
Miller also tried to recreate the look of The Spirit comic just as he and Rodriguez had for Sin City, but his efforts fell flat and the film was a critical dud and a box office flop. Rodriguez and Miller reunited in 2014 for Sin City: A Dame To Kill For and while most of the cast returned for the sequel, it simply couldn’t recapture the lightning in a bottle that the first Sin City had.
Twenty years later, Sin City’s impact has been somewhat diminished by the passage of time. But the original film remains one of the best examples of comic book cinema to date. Few other comic book adaptations have dared to stay so close to the source material, and the film was better for it.
Sin City is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video.
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