Ugly as sin (and just as exciting)

To kick things off in Robert Rodriguez’s hyper-violent comic book adaptation, Sin City, there is the matter of a flying ear.

The ear belongs to the sadistic senator’s son played by Nick Stahl, and it is graphically blown off by rogue cop Bruce Willis in the first 15 minutes of the film. Except the blood (and exposed brain matter) that we see is white, and it seems like a cinematic gauntlet being thrown down by Rodriguez to his partner-in-gore Quentin Tarantino. Yes, while Tarantino’s camera discreetly panned away while the cop’s ear was severed in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Rodriguez is right there when it happens, in brutal black and white. Later, blood — lots of blood — appears on the screen in various hues, including yellow and — what the hell — even red.

And what a long way we’ve come from the trailblazing violence-for-kicks of Tarantino’s early work.

Yes, Kill Bill pointed the gruesome way: severed limbs flying, falling under Uma Thurman’s swift samurai blade, with geysers of blood to match. But Sin City is another species altogether. Rodriguez, a fellow Sundance alumnus of Tarantino, has taken Frank Miller’s dark, funny, violent comic book tales and turned them into a living, breathing hyper-real screen epic.

Rather than simply adapting the material for the screen, Rodriguez (Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids) wanted to replicate the comic book, panel by panel. The result is a visually stunning noir-tinged world, mostly confined to black and white, but with splashes of color here and there. Rodriguez commands the cinematic space with jarring setups and compositions that are closer to a comic book than, say, Ang Lee’s The Hulk, Daredevil or even Sam Rami’s Spider-man series ever could be. Intricate rotoscoping (a process of mapping out actors’ movements, then dropping in digitized backgrounds) lends the frames a larger-than-life heft: we believe every absurd twitch and movement these characters make, especially on the big screen, where the impossible becomes graphically possible.

The violence in Sin City is controversial, to say the least. Every possible way you can imagine the tearing, rendering, pulping and mutilating of human flesh is in here. But with Rodriguez’s stylized display, blood never quite looks like blood: it looks like Paintball paint, in fact. But do expect to be shocked by various lethal dismemberings. It’s all part of the crystal-clear comic-book aesthetic.

The comic-book energy is best displayed in Mickey Rourke’s segment. The pugilistic Rourke, playing an ugly-but-honorable ex-con named Marv, moves with animal-like speed and force. He tears through doors, he drags victims along the street for "joy rides," and he takes more beatings than is humanly possible. Yet you never doubt for a second Marv’s power — say, when torturing hitmen for information about the death of a hooker called "Goldie" — nor his inner torment at occupying the human world while behaving always somewhat less than human. "Was I losing my mind?" he asks himself at one point. "Was I turning into the thing they all said I was turning into? A maniac? A psycho killer?"

Rourke puts in a star performance here, but it’s almost a "Best Animal Performance." With his boxer’s build and prosthetic face chiseled to look like a mutant Kirk Douglas, it’s hard to say where Mickey ends and the special effects begin. In Rodriguez’s haunting close-ups, every line and scar of this character is lovingly etched.

Speaking of "Animal Performances," Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro plays a scarecrow-haired wacko who gets a taste of his own medicine after beating up Brittany Murphy’s saucy barmaid. Even dead, he does some of the most over-the-top acting here.

Another weird, amazing turn comes from Elijah Wood. Yes, Frodo really spooks the hell out of you as a mutant ninja farmboy with luminescent eyes and an appetite for human flesh — particularly hookers’ flesh.

In fact, great little turns come from a number of older, somewhat has-been actors, including veteran psycho bad guy Rutger Hauer, who plays Cardinal Rourke, the senator’s brother, and the place where Marv’s brutal trail ends. Action veteran Willis plays another noble, wounded cop who saves a little girl from a pedophilic killer, only to see her all grown up and swinging from a pole at a local strip club — ably played by Jessica Alba.

The young lions in the cast are decidedly less effective in Sin City: not enough mileage, perhaps, to register real pain or fear or darkness. In fact, most of the women characters are strippers and hookers — though the hooker denizens of Old Town pack lethal weapons and are decidedly "empowered." But new heartthrob Clive Owen is funny and effective as a reluctant hero out to save Old Town from a tribal war between police and mobsters.

The reluctant hero is a standard motif of film noir, of course, and Sin City taps into true noir energy, only to crank it way up and splatter it all over the screen. We get the noir heroes, out to "save" the woman, or avenge her death; we get a gallery of femme fatales — proving Jean Luc Godard’s adage that all you need to make a noir film is "a girl and a gun." There’s the dark nocturnal cityscape, across which characters dwell, flit and slink with noir abandon, never playing by the rules of "corrupt" cops or city officials. The noir code is intact, and completely warped, in Sin City.

But above all this, there are countless cinematic references, enough to show that Rodriguez is every bit as gifted at pastiche as Tarantino. Sure, the inside-out narrative owes a lot to Pulp Fiction, as do the black-and-white car scenes (remember Bruce Willis’ scene with the lady cab driver "Esmerelda" in Pulp?). But there are shots here that also recall Apocalypse Now (at one point Hauer’s bald-headed cardinal quips: "Are you here to eliminate me?", conjuring Brando). There’s a scene of impossible, fractured rooftops, reminiscent of early noir-inspiration, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And, oh, there are swordfights and gruesome revenge scenarios and enough grisly payback to leave you feeling pretty brutalized by the time Sin City’s two hours are up. But you can’t help acknowledging this: you’ve just seen a movie, a movie quite unlike anything you’ve seen on the screen in a long time.