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Stay Out of Sin City Robert Rodriguez, I've got to hand it to you, in twenty-five years of living on this planet, this piece of garbage, Sin City, is the most aggressively unwatchable "movie" that I have ever seen. It's the kind of movie where I spend the entire second half thinking, "If I walk out before the movie ends, who wins, me or the movie?", but I was too hypnotized and shocked by the visual torture before me to make a decision until it was too late. (The last time I had that feeling, come to think of it, was during From Dusk Till Dawn.) This is a movie that is so intentionally, unremittingly, pointlessly sadistic, that it makes me feel bad about living in a society that would make it possible. Usually I'd have to watch Donald Rumsfeld give a speech uncut on C-Span to feel so pessimistic about our country. This movie is actually three different, well, separate stories in a row, that come together at the end--for no good reason. Each story involves some gruff dude that decides to initiate a parade of spectacular gore, in order to defend the honor of some hooker/stripper in distress. The revenge premise in each story is as flimsy as the premise of a porno movie; only here the flimsy premises aren't glossed over in order to move on to emotionally meaningless sex, they're glossed over in order to move on to the hot hot emotionally meaningless sadism, torture, and gore. This begs a very important question. You see, I have no problem with violence. Both Kill Bill movies I enjoyed thoroughly. So, this proves that a great movie (Kill Bill) and an awful movie (Sin City) both equally challenge the viewer's Theory of Cinema to explain their goodness or awfulness. I’ll give it a try. During Kill Bill I found myself seeming to enjoy the violence itself, in all its creatively gory graphicness. The difference is that, in Kill Bill, I wasn't expected to enjoy violence just for its own sake, but rather the triumph it represented. The killings of The Bride in Kill Bill were triumphant because Tarantino had, because he's a talented storyteller, succeeded in making me understand the Bride’s point of view and sympathize with it. The thing the bad guys did to her was so horrific that we felt she was indisputably entitled to her revenge. Also, despite the pile of bodies she created, there was always a sense that a solid ethical code existed within her. For example, she at least tried not to kill Vivica A. Fox in front of her kid. By comparison, the killing sprees in Sin City hardly seem justified. The Bruce Willis character gets into his whole predicament by shooting an unarmed child molester in the balls (which I guess I'm suppose to think is "totally awesome"). The Mickey Rourke character kills about a thousand people in order to solve the murder of a hooker, and Clive Owen kills about a thousand people, because apparently if he doesn't the cops will close down Hooker Town (how sweet). Not only are their vengeful killing sprees poorly justified, but the killing itself is so joyfully sadistic, brutal, and endless that no conceivable premise could possibly justify it. These "heroes", having no hint of any ethical compunctions, unlike Tarantino’s Bride, are left seeming no less monstrous then the worst imaginable bad guy. When it’s all said and done, Robert Rodriguez is asking us to share a monster’s joy in being a monster. Apparently, millions of Americans are happy to oblige. Hence, my further disheartening with society. Thank you, Robert Rodriguez. Not since I lost my virginity have I experienced something that was actually monotonous and nauseating at the same time. email this review to a friend
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