Sin City 2: Another Unnecessary Sequel

Sin City 2? Wasn't Sin City bad enough? Oh, sorry. The movie is what I meant, not the comic.

Sin City, the comic book written and illustrated by Frank Miller, didn't screw around.

Miller grabbed our throats and dragged us down the mean streets of a big, dark, ugly and violent metropolis found not on a map but inside the novels of tough, brass-knuckled urban poets like Mickey Spillaine, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler.

Using elegant, no-nonsense prose that felt like a well-aimed kick to the balls, they wrote brutal stories about bad cops, crooked politicians, hookers, junkies, ex-cons and dreams gone rotten. Seeing the gritty realism Miller brought to his earlier work on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, it was obvious he admired these writers very much. Sin City was a worthy addition to the genre.

Sin City was a damned good comic book. Now, it's a bad movie and Miller can't blame anybody else but himself this time.

So what the hell happened? For years, Miller wisely resisted the seductive bribes from Hollywood producers wanting to do a movie adaptation of Sin City. No, sorry, not interested. "A screenwriter is like a fire hydrant," he cynically explained, "and the dogs are lined up down the street." (Hmmm, still haven't forgiven those bastards for Robocop 2, Frank?)

But it was Robert Rodriguez (the Spy Kids trilogy, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) who changed Miller's mind. Unfortunately, despite the heartfelt admiration the two men have for each other's work, Sin City is a failure because Rodriguez's interpretation betrays the comic book.

Orson Welles observed, "making movies is the biggest train set a kid's ever had," and Rodriguez is emblematic of that famous quote. Throughout his career, he's happily been one of the Lost Boys of Neverland who doesn't want to grow up and is proud of it. Sometimes, Rodriguez's talent allows him to get away with his joyous immaturity. Not Sin City.

No matter how many car chases, explosions or gun battles there are in his movies, the violence always feels fake because Rodriguez is just too nice a guy to really want to hurt anybody. For a shoot-'em-up, vigilante fantasy like Desperado, this isn't a problem. In Sin City, this is a mistake that turns these nasty-tempered psychopaths into buffoons you can't take seriously. Unlike Miller, there's no darkness in his soul. Another mistake is the cinematography. Yes, it's technically brilliant. It's also too "pretty."

In the comic book, Sin City was colored in a grim, monochromatic rainbow of black, white and gray. The panels on his pages reminded me of the photographs of a gruesome murder catalogued by a hard-boiled newspaper reporter. But Rodriguez shellacs his movie so heavily; whatever horror there is suffocates underneath the clear, shiny plastic surface. It looks like an MTV video on steroids that's over two hours long.

However, my deepest disappointment with Sin City is the traitorous disservice it does both to "Marv" and to Mickey Rourke.

Interviewed in Premiere magazine, Rourke talked about Marv, his character in Sin City: "There's a scene where Marv goes back to his [childhood] home, and he's looking through his trunk from when he was a kid. You've seen the way he looks, the way he behaves with the cops and girls and everything, but suddenly he's going through these personal items, and it's 'Wow, there was a life before he changed into the thing he is now.' Which is something I can relate to, something that crept up on me there. The characters are so visual in the comic, but there were [also] internal goings-on with a heartbeat and a soul."

But that "heartbeat and soul" Rourke spoke about isn't in the movie. It's gone.

Why that is, I think, was the curious decision to turn Sin City into an anthology by incorporating three stories from the comic book: "The Hard Goodbye", "The Big Fat Kill" and "That Yellow Bastard." Of course, trying to squeeze three storylines into one movie meant ruthlessly amputating characters, plot and narrative coherence with an ax. At the end of this butchery, in spite of having exceptional actors like Bruce Willis, Michael Madsen, Carla Gugino, Elijah Wood, Michael Clarke Duncan, Rosario Dawson and Clive Owen, there wasn't much they could do with the bloody scraps that were left.

And, to put it simply, not enough Marv.

Hidden by his bad makeup and handicapped by the off-key dialogue, Rourke succeeds in illuminating this violent, beer-drinking, pill-popping monster with a heartbeat and a soul. Driven to avenge a beautiful prostitute named Goldie murdered in his bed while he slept in a drunken stupor, Marv is a man who, even as we're horrified by his brutality, we admire because we can see his pride, courage and loyalty.

Whenever Mickey Rourke isn't in Sin City, the movie ceases to exist. Why Rodriguez just didn't send everybody else home and keep his cameras on Marv, I don't know. But because he didn't, Sin City becomes another lousy movie adaptation of a great comic book and a waste of Rourke's hard work.

So Miller finally got the movie he wanted. However, instead of a dark, perilous journey into the belly of the Beast, where we arrived was a safe, let's-take-the-kids theme park in Disneyland that takes your money, makes fraudulent promises it can't keep, and goes nowhere. Will Sin City 2 be any different? Why should it be?