Sin City (2005)
★★★½ — Sin City (2005)
Released in 2005 through Dimension Films and Miramax, Sin City arrived as something genuinely unusual: a crime thriller adapted directly from Frank Miller's series of graphic novels of the same name, with Miller himself co-directing alongside Robert Rodriguez. The decision to credit Miller as co-director was, at the time, a talking point in its own right, acknowledging just how faithful the production intended to be to its source material. Rodriguez had been pushing at the edges of mainstream Hollywood for years, most comfortably operating as a one-man band out of his Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas. If you want a sense of the kind of films he gravitates towards, his earlier work covered here includes From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), both of which share that same appetite for excess, genre play and a certain gleeful disregard for restraint. Sin City, though, represented something more ambitious still: a film that wanted to look, structurally and visually, like the panels on a printed page.
The film runs at 124 minutes and weaves together several of Miller's storylines, set in the fictional Basin City, a place populated almost entirely by corrupt officials, hired killers, and people with very few good options. It is structured as an anthology of sorts, though the threads share a world and, occasionally, faces. The production was shot almost entirely against green screen, with the distinctive high-contrast, near-monochrome visual style created largely in post-production. That approach, polished but uncompromising, was striking enough that it influenced a wave of comic-book and graphic-novel adaptations that followed it. The cast assembled is, on paper at least, remarkable: Bruce Willis (whose range across genres you can see elsewhere in his appearance in The Fifth Element (1997)), Mickey Rourke in a physically transformed performance, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, and Rutger Hauer, among a roster of recognisable faces that pop up throughout. Each actor is working within a deliberately stylised register, the kind of hard-boiled, noir-drenched performances that require commitment rather than naturalism. Whether they pull it off, and whether the film sustains its considerable ambition across its full running time, is the real question.
Amazing artistically, just lacking something... Visually, this film is stunning. The black and white aesthetic with bursts of colour is iconic, it’s like watching a graphic novel brought to life in real time. The art direction is genuinely some of the best ever put to screen, and the all-star cast leans into the pulpy, noir world with great success. The soundtrack is perfectly moody. It’s one of the finest examples of comic book to screen adaptation, no doubt. But it does feel like it’s missing something. Maybe it overstays its welcome a bit, tighten it to 90 minutes and it might’ve been near perfect. Still, as far as stylised storytelling goes, it’s an unforgettable and bold piece of filmmaking.
I keep coming back to that point about the running time, because I think it's the most honest criticism you can level at it. The style never gets old, but at nearly two hours and five minutes, a few of the segments do start to blur into one another, and you can feel the film coasting on its own look rather than pushing its stories forward. Trim the fat, and what you're left with is close to a landmark. As it stands, it's still one of the more daring things to come out of American cinema in that decade, and for anyone who wants to see what happens when a filmmaker genuinely commits to a vision without blinking, it remains well worth your time. Style, when it's this considered, is never just decoration. Sometimes it is the argument.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2025-04-14
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Sin City (2005) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Robert Rodriguez: Planet Terror (2007) · From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) · Machete (2010) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
More with Bruce Willis: Armageddon (1998) · Alpha Dog (2006) · The Fifth Element (1997) · Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
