Product Details

• Actors: Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Devon Aoki
• Directors: Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez
• Writers: Frank Miller
• Producers: Bill Scott, Bob Weinstein, Elizabeth Avellan, Harvey Weinstein
• Format: NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Run Time: 124 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (848 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000ARIS52
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,220 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Sin City" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books. In the first of three separate but loosely related stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke in heavy makeup) tries to track down the killers of a woman who ended up dead in his bed. In the second story, Dwight's (Clive Owen) attempt to defend a woman from a brutal abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens to destroy the uneasy truce among the police, the mob, and the women of Old Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last day on the job (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a kidnapper, but is himself thrown in jail. Years later, he has a chance to save her again.

Based on three of Miller's immensely popular and immensely gritty books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard), Sin City is unquestionably the most faithful comic-book-based movie ever made. Each shot looks like a panel from its source material, and director Rodriguez (who refers to it as a "translation" rather than an adaptation) resigned from the Directors Guild so that Miller could share a directing credit. Like the books, it's almost entirely in stark black and white with some occasional bursts of color (a woman's red lips, a villain's yellow face). The backgrounds are entirely digitally generated, yet not self-consciously so, and perfectly capture Miller's gritty cityscape. And though most of Miller's copious nudity is absent, the violence is unrelentingly present. That may be the biggest obstacle to viewers who aren't already fans of the books and who may have been turned off by Kill Bill (whose director, Quentin Tarantino, helmed one scene of Sin City). In addition, it's a bleak, desperate world in which the heroes are killers, corruption rules, and the women are almost all prostitutes or strippers. But Miller's stories are riveting, and the huge cast--which also includes Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Michael Clarke Duncan, Devin Aoki, Carla Gugino, and Josh Hartnett--is just about perfect. (Only Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen, while very well-suited to their roles, seem hard to separate from their established screen personas.) In what Rodriguez hopes is the first of a series, Sin City is a spectacular achievement. --David Horiuchi

From The New Yorker

A few strands of melodrama have been pulled from Frank Miller's graphic novels and plaited together-just about-into a coherent comic-strip film. Miller himself co-directs, in collaboration with Robert Rodriguez (plus a little help from Quentin Tarantino), and there is certainly no letup, or pulled punches, in the heightening of style. The movie is in monochrome, splashed with occasional color, and the sheer force of overkill-the ear-crunching sound level, the disturbingly joyful violence-turns a sequence of horrific events into a stream of unfeeling comedy. The plots offer vengeance upon vengeance: cops against child-killers, cops against priests, hookers against cops, thugs against everybody. The cast is a blast, including Bruce Willis, Michael Madsen, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, a bewitching Carla Gugino, and a renascent Mickey Rourke. Most of them enter with sweat and gusto into the spirit of the thing-fortunately so, for without such eagerness the movie would feel merely cruel. What it has to tell us of life, let alone suffering, beyond the savage enchantment of the movies could be written on the head of a bullet.-A.L. (4/11/05) (Battery Park 11, Chelsea Cinemas, Cinemas 1, 2, and 3, 84th Street Sixplex, Empire 25, Kips Bay Theatre, Magic Johnson Theatres, Orpheum VII, 34th Street Theatre, and Union Square.) -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

451 of 529 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well, I liked it..., April 20, 2005

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Wheelchair Assassin (The Great Concavity) - See all my reviews

While it's probably a total cliche to say it by now, Sin City really is a wild thrill ride of a movie, and quite possibly the most entertaining thing that will hit theaters all year. Adapted by director Robert Rodriguez from Frank Miller's graphic-novel series, it's an energetic slab of neo-noir, complete with twisted characters, ambiguous morality, and deadly serious dialogue. For those who thought the Kill Bill movies weren't bizarre or violent enough, Sin City ought to seem like a stylish, action-packed gift from guy-movie heaven. It's filled with negativity, outrageously over the-top bloodletting, and some of the blackest humor known to man, but it all works anyway. I even managed to forgive the incessant voice-over narration, normally a rather lazy device, because it's so oddly poignant and poetic. It's not really that big a deal anyway, because this movie is so impressive visually that the characters could speak in gibberish and I'd probably still be moved to give it at least three stars.

It should be noted right off the bat that Sin City is not a movie for everyone, but if you're the type who would like it you presumably know who you are. IF you like crime movies, especially those filled with action and atmosphere, you will almost certainly get a kick out of Sin City. If you prefer lighter, more "socially redeeming" fare, you may still like it, or you may be overcome with bile filling your throat for most of its two-hour running time. It's all a matter of how willing you are to accept what's going on without asking too many nagging questions like "How exactly did Mickey Rourke just take out ten armed riot cops with nothing more than his fists and a hatchet?" or "is it really possible or even necessary to manually tear off a man's scrotum?". Everything about this movie is utterly outsized, from the themes to the characters to the action, but in the end it's a rousing success at what it intends to do, which is entertain. It's precisely because this movie was so utterly entertaining that I found myself unwilling to nitpick; you'll probably be too busy having your senses assaulted to linger on any problems you may have with the movie. Nothing is more key in movies (or TV, or novels for that matter) than getting the viewer to suspend disbelief, to simply let go and enjoy what's transpiring regardless of the plausibility level. Some of my favorite movies are wildly unrealistic, but at some point when watching them I just decided to go with it. Sin City is one such movie: I realized early on that the events unfolding onscreen bore little to no resemblance to reality as presently constituted; I just didn't care. I went to see this movie with my wife (who is, to put it mildly, not a fan of dark or violent movies), and she may have summed up the experience of watching it the best when she said simply "I was never bored." That, ultimately, is the secret to Sin City's success: it's so gripping to watch that it's hard to care about anything else.

As everyone (and probably their brothers) knows by now, Sin City was filmed using real actors against a black-and-white CGI background with some touches of color added for dramatic effect. It may seem like a gimmick at first, but Sin City is all about bringing the viewer into a sort of parallel universe, so this unconventional device works perfectly. Sin City is a movie dealing with lives on the edge, and it conjures up a delightfully dark, grimy, and gritty atmosphere to go match the depravity of its subject matter. Weighty themes and over-the-top violence abound here, and it's only fitting that the movie's look and feel should be so uniformly haunting. Consisting of three tangentially related stories occurring out of sequence, Sin City brings the viewer into an underworld populated by thieves, murderers, hookers, and dirty cops, and the morality is viewed entirely in shades of grey. In the Basin City of the movie, where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are even worse, violence is often a virtue, or at the very least a prerequisite for survival. If there's one redeeming value to Sin City's cartoonish ultraviolence, it's that it's painfully clear that its recipients generally deserve it.

Anyway, if there's one theme running through all of these stories, it's that of redemption. The protagonist in each tale (Bruce Willis's Hartigan, Rourke's Marv, and Clive Owen's Dwight) is a most unlikely hero (although Hartigan is just a regular cop and therefore not exactly bad, whereas it's clear that Marv and Dwight are murderers), but each finds himself driven to acts of extreme courage and sacrifice in order to see justice done. Sin City portrays a kind of heroism not typically seen in movies (especially big-budget, sanitized Hollywood productions), one that comes from doing the right thing even when it's nowhere near being the easiest thing. Rourke's Marv is probably the most memorable character, a hulking thug with a highly overdeveloped sense of vengeance who managed to arouse some of my sympathy even as he cut a swath of unimaginable destruction through his enemies on his way to avenging a murdered prostitute. Out of the legions of other figures in the movie, the great Benicio Del Toro deserves some special mention as a comically malevolent crooked cop who won't shut up even after he meets his unfortunate end.

Now, although I've gone on too long already, I'd feel remiss if I didn't talk about Sin City's staggering violence quotient. Yes, this an extremely graphic movie, and much of the violence is downright disturbing to watch (Elijah Wood's character being cut up and fed to a wolf is a prominent example, even if much of the violence in that case was implied), but it's just as true that context is an important factor when considering just how offensive such bloodletting is. Now, for one thing, Sin City is meant to be a piece of escapist cinema, so nothing that takes place onscreen should be taken too seriously anyway. After all, no one got offended during the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur cut off the Black Knight's arms and legs; that scene was meant to be funny and it was. Perhaps more to the point, the violence here is so ludicrously over the top from the opening scene that it's hard to imagine any rational person getting too upset. You have to just go with it; if you're the kind of person who makes it a point to be huffy and offended all the time you shouldn't be seeing this movie anyway. 'Nuff said

212 of 259 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Basin City Blues, July 21, 2005

By 

Glenn A. Buttkus (Sumner, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sin City (DVD)

The concept for this film started in the Comics revolution of the late 60's with incredible artists like Frank Frazetta, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, and Barry Smith. They knew anatomy, and they used photographs to compose their backgrounds. Pre-Anime, the characters began to "almost" move off the pages. Frank Miller came along in 1978. He helped to inaugurate the adult graphics novels-larger formats, better paper, brighter inks-coupled to nudity and R-rated dialogue. Some of this has been around since the late 50's, but the new format was gathering speed and Miller was in the vanguard.

Miller's graphic novel's about SIN CITY contained art in panels that broke down like very detailed storyboards. When Robert Rodriguez decided to court Miller and sell him on the idea of converting the graphics to digital video-Miller loved it. Their partnership went so far as to have Rodriguez dropping out of the Director's Guild so that he might be permitted to put Frank Miller in the credits as co-director. Rodriguez created a B&W world where color was used sparingly-and for great effect. Blood was white-or bright red. Some eyes were blue. Some hair was blond. Pale green and pale blue showed up on classic cars.

Rodriguez assembled a powerhouse cast. Bruce Willis was first up, to boost the sales of the production and the star power. He was excellent in the film-beginning to appear very Noir-very Chandler and Hammett-a modern Bogart. Using CGI and live actors, Rodriguez was able to do most of the work in his homegrown studio in Texas. Miller created a world part pulp-novel, classic cars-and part hyper-violent martial arts and splatter film. Everybody smoked, many of them drove a ragtop-they could shoot guns with both hands simultaneously-and women, regardless of how far they had fallen-were still treated with respect. More than an adaptation of Millers comic book art-it is literally his artwork brought starkly to life. The effect is original, violent, sexy, existential-and very effective.

The film worked off three Miller "stories"-and the best of the three-THE BIG FAT KILL-starred Mickey Rourke. He can think of this film as his return to the big time. He is brilliant. His character, Marv, is perfectly fitted for this new genre-and his acting, and the action he precipitates-blows all the others in the film out of the water. This may be Rourke's finest performance. He has been a pro boxer, as well as actor-and he needed that physical prowess for this role.

Everyone in the film was impressive-with the likes of Clive Owen, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer, Nick Stahl, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood, Michael Madsen, Josh Harnett, and Michael Clarke Duncan all making love, murdering, or slapping around women like Jessica Albo, Jamie King, Rosario Dawson, Carla Gugino, and Brittany Murphy. One critic wrote," This is a Mickey Spillane fever dream!"

There is a rumor that in the director's cut RR will include some deleted scenes that he shot to flush out all three of the Miller stories. It appears that a sequel is imminent-absolutely necessary. Most of us can't wait for the next installment-to cruise Old Town, prowl the Roark farm, beware of the warrior hookers, love the hot babes, dodge the bullets and swords and knives, and stare at those great cars.

53 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal Beautiful Breathtaking "City", April 4, 2005

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G P Padillo "paolo" (Portland, ME United States) - See all my reviews
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With any luck Frank Miller's "Sin City" will inspire a new genre of filmmaking - a literal union between filmmaking and the world of comic books/graphic novels. I know, I know, there have been countless films inspired by the world of comic books which have attempted to recreate the chills and thrills. Not one of them - even the best (e,g,, Spiderman series, Tales from the Crypt, etc.) has been remotely as successful as the creative team that gives us this brilliant, jarring, vision.

Rodriguez, Miller and company obviously put themselves (and the cast) through painstaking paces to assure every frame, every emotion emoted by an astonishing array of live talent is instilled with the gritty, graphic hyperrealism of the world of Frank Miller. It is a breathtaking achievement which, alas, will go unnoticed and be underappreciated by many who don't "get" this world.

The cast is nothing short of remarkable: Mickey Rourke gives his finest performance since Barfly - maybe ever. Bruce Willis has never given a better performance than the retiring cop, Hartigan. Everyone involved is obviously relishing having the time of their lives. Outside of Shakespeare I can't imagine anything currently more theatrically over-the-top and satisfying than being associated with Sin City.

For many the violence will be of too gory and graphic in nature (gorygraphic?). Others will enjoy the rough ride but also be appreciative of the often stunning beauty of so many of this film's images. The final tale in the trilogy of stories that make up the movie is shot with the cool and chill of winter bathed in a snow storm of such exquisite beauty that I don't find it difficult to say it is among the most beautiful images I've seen in any film. Ever.