Sin City is a well made adaptation, a blend of digitally enhanced comic art, Sky Captain style, and high contrast silvery tones, Leni Riefenstahl style.
Unfortunately, it is as morally bankrupt as the work of the latter.
Sin City creates baddies that nobody will defend, child killers and child rapists, complete with a nod to catholic priest involvement, and demonizes them to the extent that we are supposed to be entertained by the revenge that is coming to them.
This is nothing new, although it does tend to be the terrain of low-brow film making such as ‘Death Wish’. The difference in Sin City, is that having been spurred on by the acceptance of caricature ultra-violence in Kung Fu inspired Tarantino films, Sin City chooses to linger on the elimination of the bad guys.
In other words Sin City shows the bad guys being tortured to death.
So here was I on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by popcorn munching and soda sipping, watching a bad guy having his dick and balls ripped out by hand and his head pummeled into a soft pulp by Bruce Willis – and I couldn’t see the justification for this, the message, the irony even, other than a slightly worrying thought that the bad guy looked like the depiction of the bad guys in shots I’ve seen from a Nazi propaganda film.
Except this wasn’t propaganda, this was entertainment, there was no message.