Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller brought Miller’s comics to the screen in 2005 with Sin City, a neo-noir crime anthology that premiered at the Mann National Theater on March 28 and opened in theaters on April 1 under Miramax Films. The film runs 124 minutes and stars an ensemble that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Benicio del Toro, Rutger Hauer and Elijah Wood.
Trailer, via The Academy.
Three Stories, One Broken Town
Sin City pulls most of its material from the first, third and fourth books in Miller’s comic series. The Hard Goodbye follows Marv, played by Mickey Rourke, an ex-convict who tears through the city hunting the person who killed his one-time sweetheart. The Big Fat Kill puts Dwight, played by Clive Owen, in the middle of a street war involving a group of prostitutes, a band of mercenaries, the police and the mob. That Yellow Bastard centers on Hartigan, played by Bruce Willis, an aging police officer trying to protect a young woman from a disfigured serial killer.
The film’s intro and outro come from “The Customer is Always Right,” a short story collected in Booze, Broads & Bullets, the sixth book in the series. That framing device matters more than its short runtime suggests. It sets the film’s rules before the first full story starts and reminds you at the end what kind of town you have been standing in.
A Cast That Fills Every Corner
The cast list is the film’s loudest argument for itself. Alongside Rourke, Owen and Willis, Sin City gives screen time to Jessica Alba as Nancy, Benicio del Toro as Jackie Boy, Rutger Hauer as Cardinal Roark, Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, Nick Stahl as Roark Jr. and the Yellow Bastard, Michael Madsen as Bob, Alexis Bledel as Becky, Devon Aoki as Miho and Michael Clarke Duncan as Manute.
Both directors appear on screen as well. Miller plays a priest. Rodriguez turns up as a member of a SWAT team. Neither cameo is a stunt that breaks the film. They read as two men signing a piece of work they clearly meant to own.
- Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
- Written by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez
- Runtime: 124 minutes
- Genres: Crime, Thriller
- Tagline: “There is no justice without sin.”
- Premiered: March 28, 2005, at the Mann National Theater
- Released: April 1, 2005, by Miramax Films
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 76 percent
The Color Processing Is the Whole Point
Sin City drew particular recognition for its color processing, which renders most of the film in black and white. That choice is not decoration. It is the film’s entire visual grammar, and it is the reason the movie still looks like nothing else released that year.
Most of the frame is stripped to black, white and shadow. Color arrives only when the film wants you to look somewhere specific. The result is a movie that behaves like a comic panel that learned to move. Where a conventional crime film would use lighting and camera placement to guide your eye, Sin City uses the absence of color itself.
The approach could have curdled into a two-hour gimmick. It does not, largely because the source material was already built for it. Miller’s comics were drawn in stark black and white, and the film treats that as a blueprint rather than an obstacle. The town in Sin City is a place where the corrupt, the tough and the brokenhearted all live under the same gray sky, and the palette says so before a single line of dialogue lands.
What the Three Stories Share
Each of the three main stories runs on the same engine. A man with a code, or the wreckage of one, decides to do the right thing in a city that refuses to care. Marv wants the killer of his one-time sweetheart. Dwight gets pulled into a war he did not start. Hartigan tries to shield a young woman from a serial killer.
The film’s own synopsis puts it well: crooked cops, desperate vigilantes, people seeking revenge, people lusting after redemption, and some hoping for a little of both. That is not a plot summary so much as a description of the film’s entire emotional register. Sin City is not interested in whether its characters win. It is interested in whether they keep going.
The anthology structure serves this. Three stories, three men, one town, and no promise that any of them will come out clean. The film never pretends the city can be fixed. It only asks what a person does inside a place that has already given up.
Where the Film Stumbles
The weaknesses are real. Sin City leans hard on its own surface, and when the surface is this strong, the temptation is to let it carry more than it can. Some stretches of the film feel like a sequence of striking images held together by attitude rather than by momentum. The Big Fat Kill in particular has a lot of moving parts — prostitutes, mercenaries, police, mob — and the film does not always keep them sorted cleanly.
The ensemble is enormous, and not everyone gets the room they deserve. With this many names on the poster, some of them register as faces rather than characters. That is the cost of the anthology format, and Sin City pays it.
None of this sinks the film. It just keeps Sin City short of the top tier of crime cinema. A 76 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, which works out to 7.6 out of 10, is about right. The film is a genuine achievement in visual craft and a slightly uneven one as storytelling.
Why It Still Holds
What Sin City gets right, it gets right in a way few films have matched. The color processing alone would have made it notable. That it also lands Marv’s rampage, Dwight’s street war and Hartigan’s protection of a young woman with this much conviction is what makes it last.
The tagline is “There is no justice without sin.” The film believes that. Every story in it is about someone paying a price for trying to do the right thing in a town that will not thank them. That is a narrow idea, and Sin City commits to it completely.
The result is a crime anthology that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize. It is not a perfect film. It is a film with a look and a mood that have not been duplicated, built from Miller’s own comics by two directors who clearly understood what they were adapting.
Sin City premiered at the Mann National Theater on March 28, 2005, and reached theaters on April 1 through Miramax Films. Two decades on, its reputation rests where it should: on that black-and-white frame, and on three men in a city that never cared whether they lived.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
