The Stath puts together a team and starts his series of tricks and ambushes of the Brits on his hit list. They have to be clever about it because they have to first get a videotaped confession, then kill them but have it look like an accident. That’s hard enough, but another ex-S.A.S. guy who’s not on the list (Clive Owen) stumbles across their suspicious snooping and starts interfering with their whole plot. So there are some fights, some car chases, some guns.

I like how the posters and the DVD/blu-ray cover tell you the most important thing you need to know: these are some guys that wear sunglasses and shoot guns. But they leave off my favorite member of the sunglass-wearing/gun-shooting team: Dominic Purcell, believe it or not, in a role a little better than I’ve seen him in before. He wears a ridiculous mustache and sideburns well and they adapt organically into his disguises as he fakes a couple different nationalities. (Nobody buys his Welsh, though.) He has a really good comedic moment where he’s on a beach with his gut hanging out and fakes an ice cream cone accident to cover letting the air out of a tire.

Owen’s part is interesting because if they edited the scenes in a different order he would be the good guy. Statham and team are introduced first, so we identify with them, but they’re guilty of the exact same kind of murders these S.A.S. guys are being avenged for (”I’m just glad I never did a raghead,” Purcell says – a racist way of admitting that they could easily be the ones on the list). In his circle Owen is the perceptive one who figures out there’s a plot afoot, and that nobody will listen to. He even gets set up to take a fall for them – the whole hero thing. He could be Tom Cruise in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. He’s totally the good guy.

He does have a mustache though, that’s the only thing that really makes him evil. He has a glass eye too, but you notice the mustache first.

One detail I like is the tension between Clive and the emerging punk culture in Britain. In one scene he’s in a bar and some punks turn on the juke box while he’s trying to watch a news report about a dead soldier. He yells at them for having no respect. In a funnier scene a crazy old ex-S.A.S. guy beats the shit out of four skinheads for keying his car.

I’m happy to report that this doesn’t have all the dull trappings of modern action. There is some color in it, some sunshine, some variation in locations. Some of the face-to-face fights are a little shaky, but overall the action is pretty old fashioned workmanlike, for better or worse. There are some suspenseful sequences (like when they gotta force two other vehicles into an accident) and some good moves (bread loaf silencer, tied-to-chair-flip, tunnel chase hornet’s nest elbow [done by Ben Mendelsohn, the most evil guy from ANIMAL KINGDOM]).

DeNiro’s a prisoner for most of the movie but does manage to be involved in a couple big shoot outs and later has a scene where he uses his charm to keep Statham’s girl (Yvonne Strahovski) from panicking. Like the movie itself this mentor character is not exactly one of the greats, but is pretty likable. I like how he calls 44 year old Statham “kid” or “kiddo” all the time, and how he decides he has to go back to get his watch during an escape attempt.

This KILLER ELITE has nothing to do with the Sam Peckinpah movie THE KILLER ELITE. It’s adapted from a 1991 book called “The Feather Men” by Ralph and Joseph Fiennes’s third cousin Sir Ranulph Fiennes. That sounds made up, but it’s true. That’s the guy’s name and he really is related to them. The book was promoted as non-fiction even though the words “FACT OR FICTION?” were on the cover and that seems to be sort of a self answering question. You wouldn’t put that on the cover of “Angela’s Ashes.” From summaries of the book it sounds like it’s different from the movie in that the assassinations take place over 17 years, and Clive Owen probly is the good guy. His group are called “The Feather Men” and they save Sir Fiennes from being killed by what would be Statham’s group, “The Clinic.” In the movie I guess his character is one of the ones that gets killed. The text at the end still claims it’s a true story, so maybe out of spite Fiennes now says it was all made up.

Anyway, KILLER ELITE’s not bad. You could do worse. I guess it made sense to put Statham in the remake of THE MECHANIC because he really is putting together a body of work that in a way makes him the closest thing we have to a modern Charles Bronson. Or at least a white Jim Brown. He just needs some more DEATH WISHes under his belt. But he’s got a bunch of THE EVIL THAT MEN DOs.

More importantly, the guy is holding a baby in one hand and a gun in the other. Forget what it means. Concentrate on what it is.

Well, that’s also what SHOOT ‘EM UP is. An entire movie based on the feelings you get looking at that poster. This one has Clive Owen instead of Chow Yun Fat (a worthy successor) and it’s a different baby (they tried to get the HARDBOILED baby but he wanted too much money). The movie has obvious references to Leone and Looney Tunes, and lots of bad puns like a Schwarzenegger movie, its influences are all over the place. But clearly the main one is John Woo, and specifically HARDBOILED. If director Michael Davis (writer of PREHYSTERIA 3) was a baby, John Woo would be carrying him during the shootout. But since he’s only a baby he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. So the movie is John Woo not in substance or even in style, but in the simple fact that it’s a whole movie about a bad motherfucker carrying a baby while running around, shooting hundreds of people, sliding, swinging, rolling, dropping, flying, falling, catapulting, and, you know, carrying on. While shooting.

The movie is not a masterpiece. I say that only because I believe a movie like this COULD be a masterpiece. This one is not because the editing is too quick, the camera is generally too close to the action, the music is mostly cheesy, some of the oneliners are corny but not a good enough kind of corny, some of the running gags run too many times, some of the exposition of the deliberately convoluted storyline gets a little more clunky than is acceptable. In other words, this PREHYSTERIA 3 guy is no master yet. But the movie is a hell of alot of fun, I would be an asshole to dismiss it based on those flaws. I really enjoyed this movie.

Although it’s way more of a comedy and it’s about ten times sillier, the movie SHOOT ‘EM UP most reminded me of was TRANSPORTER 2. Because it’s action packed, it’s completely ridiculous, it wipes boogers on all matters of logic and science, it is not serious but pretends to be, and it’s less than 90 minutes so it gets in there, gets the job done and then hauls ass out the back door before you can say thank you. And leaves its empty beer bottles in your living room. But this one leaves more beer bottles than TRANSPORTER 2 does if the beer bottles are a metaphor for memorable gimmicks and acts of over-the-top violence. Which they are.

In case this is somehow the first you’ve heard of SHOOT ‘EM UP, I should probaly mention what it’s about. So I will describe the opening, which is a classic. Our nameless hero sits on a bus stop bench eating a carrot. Suddenly a pregnant woman runs by, clutching her stomach as if going into labor. He glances over, mildly curious at best. Then a car tears around the corner and crashes, its driver yelling that he’s going to kill her. He gets out, runs after her, asks our carrot-eater what the fuck he’s looking at. Before the guy turns the corner he pulls out a gun.

And Clive has to think about it for a little bit before he admits to himself that he should try to help her. And then he says, “Fuck.” The definition of a reluctant hero.

Of course he turns out to have black ops training, skills inherited from his father, a meaningful traumatic incident in his past, and every other cliche you would want him to have. (If I were you I would see the movie without reading on, because I’m gonna spoil just a couple of the gags. There are plenty to go around, but still.) So in this opening he winds up shooting an army of killers while simultaneously delivering the baby. And then he shoots off the umbilical cord. Can you believe that? At that point I was sold on the movie, and fortunately I did not find that I had bought a lemon. The movie delivers on the opening scene’s promise.

Gorgeous frenchwoman Monica Belluci plays the female lead (a lactating hooker, of course) and Academy Award loser Paul Giamatti gets to be the lead hitman. I bet he hasn’t fired that many guns in all of his previous movies combined times ten. Including THE HAWK IS DYING and the one where Frankie Muniz paints him blue.

Belluci and Giamatti are enjoyable, but the movie is almost entirely fueled by two things: Clive Owen’s grimacing, angry presence (alot like his character in SIN CITY, except with his real accent) and a constant barrage of preposterous action ideas and jokes. Again, I hate to give anything away at all but I will give you just three examples in case you’re not sold.

1. He’s hiding in a public restroom with the baby. But he’s trying to take a bite out of his carrot and he drops his piece in the toilet. So, while a gunman approaches, he leaves the baby on the floor and uses the diaper changing station to take his gun apart and clean it piece by piece.

(There are many classic restroom fights in cinema, and I am still hoping to see one where the hero washes his hands afterwards. I thought this might finally be the one but no dice.)

2. In a gun factory he duct-tapes guns to various shelves and sets up a complex system of strings and pulleys which he uses like marionettes to take out a platoon of henchmen.

3. Remember in DIE HARD Bruce had no shoes on, then in LAST MAN STANDING he tried to up the ante by getting attacked while having sex with Judd Apatow’s wife and having to shoot a bunch of guys while still naked. Well, Clive raises the bet by being involved in a shootout WHILE STILL PENETRATING Monica. And in fact he choreographs his movements and perhaps even the vibrations of his gun shots for maximum sexual performance. We can only pray this scene does not inspire people the way Marlon Brando’s butter did. Maybe the movie should have a disclaimer like cigarettes or JACKASS.

Now imagine dozens more gimmicks like those crammed into an 80-some minute lighthearted but bloody-as-all-get-out movie. It’s full of all kinds of shit like that. The only thing that would be better would be if it was not actually meant to be funny. It is trying to be funny, but oh well. It achieves its goal.

I gotta be honest, I will be disappointed if this does not become a series. Like I said the director is not a master, but I’d like to see what he’d do with a little more money and an established universe and audience. I think it will happen, because I think it’s gonna be a real sleeper. Of course, I’m terrible at judging those kinds of things, and I do know alot of people would say it was “stoopid.” But the particular audience I saw it with laughed all throughout and applauded at about 3 or 4 different points, all well-earned. If you love guns, or if you are like Clive’s character and you hate guns, then this is the movie for you.

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33906

[ratings]

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Technically this is a sci-fi movie, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels so fuckin real. Most dystopia movies are stylized in some way to make them look cool. This one goes for reality. The only futuristic technology you see is for mundane things like video games and animated bus ads. It looks great (like all of director Alfonso Cuaron’s movies) but not like a beautiful painting, more like a good documentary, and mostly shot handheld. There are 4 or 5 classic sequences here that I have no idea how they could’ve possibly been done. Like, there’s a scene where Clive Owen, the hero, runs through a war zone surrounded by total fuckin mayhem. In what appears to be one continuous handheld shot he runs between buildings, up stairs, through hallways evading hundreds of gunshots, seeing tanks blow up buildings, having emotional moments with other characters. And not a moment of it looked artificial to me. The only thing in the whole movie that struck me as a special effect was, of all things, a baby. And that was a good special effect. But the rest looked like reality.

I don’t know, maybe it’s not a mainstream crowdpleaser. I’m pretty sure I heard a lady say “This is stupid” near the end, during one of many incredibly intense moments. I can’t understand how a movie that grabs you by the collar and shakes you like this could bore normal people. I understood it with SOLARIS. But sadly that maybe happening because this is that type of sci-fi without lasers, spaceships or kung fu. And in case you’re wondering it’s not a sequel or remake of Schwarzenegger’s JUNIOR. Not sure what the title means exactly but this is the story of a world in about 20 years where all women are infertile and the youngest person in the world (18 year old “Baby Diego”) has just been stabbed to death. With no hope for the future the whole world has gone to shit, civil wars and bombings and who knows what. We see on TV propaganda that all the great cities of the world have somehow fallen, but England claims to stand strong. It’s fucked up though – Clive almost gets blown up going for his morning coffee. I guess this must be pretty common because later he goes home from work early not using the excuse “I would’ve been dead if I had stopped for napkins” but “Baby Diego’s death is affecting me more than I realized.”

Clive doesn’t really give a shit, so he needs a nudge to go on an adventure. He gets kidnapped by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), leader of a group of militants called The Fishes. She needs his help to transport a young refugee woman who, we learn later in the movie (if we haven’t seen the previews or read this review) has somehow become pregnant. So they need to bring her to a group that may or may not exist who may or may not help, while other factions fight over the baby.

This may not be a movie for the lady who said it was stupid, but if you’re reading this you’re probaly into movies and I would say this is a must see. It’s hard to explain how much this movie impressed me except to say that there’s never been one quite like it. I mean holy shit. Even if you don’t like the story of this movie for some reason, you will see some masterfully constructed scenes, the kind of pure moviemaking that doesn’t come along every year. I mentioned that one scene, there’s another one about sneaking away from a farm at dawn. Again, there is a long sequence of complicated stunts that are done in one continuous shot, and yet somehow this is done with the sky just starting to turn light. It’s not the kind of light that stays around long enough for you to do 150 takes of a scene. But it looks like the real sky. How the fuck did they make this movie? I knew this Alfonso Cuaron was good, I knew he could make a pretty movie. Everybody knows that. But this? All the sudden he’s a master. He has taken the limitations of the medium by the neck and told them to go fuck themselves. And their mama too.

Most of the people I’ve talked to who have seen it seem to think it’s the movie of the year or the best movie in years. But I’ve seen some bad reviews. I’m sure there are legitimate criticisms, but most of what I’ve seen is of the “they never explain why such and such happens” variety. As if it is some requirement of good storytelling that every god damn thing has to be spelled out for you. As if it’s not allowed to let the audience think about things. I guess these are the same people driven crazy by MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE:3 purposely not explaining what exactly the weapon they were all fighting over does. It was lame for them to miss out on a fun movie like that for such a stupid reason, but to miss out on this one is a low down shame. This one’s gonna be around for a long time though. Maybe they’ll figure it out in a couple years.

These people are also bothered that the movie is obviously relevant to the world we live in, but you have to digest it and interpret it for yourself. It’s not just “war is bad” or “I am against racism” or “in a world where feelings are against the law, only one man can do kung fu using guns.” But that’s one reason why the movie is smart. It’s kind of like an impression of the fucked up times we’re living in now, a natural extension of today’s world. But there’s not some direct symbolic parallel like “oh, this represents Bush, this represents Tony Blair” or some shit like that. Instead it’s just the kind of world that we know can happen now that we’ve seen Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Homeland Security, Iraq, terrorist watch lists, etc.

And come to think of it, there’s no “Big Brother” character. The whole world is oppressing you, you don’t need a Big Brother.

But the best thing about the movie is that it’s fucking intense. It’s more like war journalism than a 1984 type of story. Somebody told me this reminded her of THE PIANIST, which is a good comparison. It’s a similar kind of relentless brutality and series of harrowing escapes. Usually in a movie the heroes will be in these action situations and you have to suspend your disbelief that they manage to not get shot, to not get hit by the flying car or whatever. Here it just seems like pure random luck. He’s not a warrior, he’s potential collateral damage. But he happened to turn the right way to miss the bullets. The guy that was going to shoot him happened to get shot at and turn to fire back.

It’s not what most people would call an action movie. But in a weird way the movie I kept thinking of was MAD MAX. Because this has some of the most intense chase scenes I’ve ever seen. To be honest, I was not 100% into the movie in the early part, but suddenly there is a scene where the protagonists are driving along a wooded road and they see a flaming car rolling across the intersection in front of them. For a second you think it’s the type of random disaster that happens in a world like this. They have to slam on their brakes and back up to avoid the fire. But then you see people running through the trees screaming, throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at the car. It’s a fucking ambush. And it gets worse from there.

I don’t know why this movie isn’t getting all that much attention, but believe me, it will. People will study this movie. Movies will copy this movie. The world, hopefully, will not turn into this movie. But it’s definitely one for the books.

[ratings]

So it’s not pure 100% grade A Spike Lee Joint which accounts for its lack of greatness, but I think it’s also kind of a good thing for Spike. He’s never made a movie completely lacking in merit (well, I haven’t seen SHE HATE ME yet) but he seems to get less and less focused as he gets older. Maybe doing one mainstream thriller will get him back in the mode of telling a somewhat concise story. I don’t know.

It’s one of them casts that Entertainment Weekly or somebody would call “high wattage”: Clive Owen is the leader of the bank robbers who storm in in painter’s outfits and take everybody hostage, Denzel (no last name required) is the lead detective, Willem Dafoe is the tactical cop dude that detective Denzel mildly clashes with, and Jodi “this and Flight Plan will probaly be the only times you see me in the next five years” Foster comes out of her bunker for a supporting role as a scary corporate somebody or other who does some sleazy, non-official negotiating between the robbers and the owner of the bank (Christopher Plummer).

Even the style of the movie is kind of watered down by Spike standards. You don’t get the in your face colors of a DO THE RIGHT THING or the crisp, vivid photography of a HE GOT GAME. And he doesn’t even go for his more realistic style. If you look at CLOCKERS and GET ON THE BUS today you can see that Spike was an early adopter of the handheld/changing film stocks/documentaryish/reality style that pretty much everybody does now. INSIDE MAN is not that, it looks more like your usual New York drama that has existed since the ’70s.

But don’t get me wrong, it’s got Spike Lee moments peppered all around. There’s at least 2 or 3 trademark Spike Lee shots, including a moment where instead of showing Denzel running toward the bank they have him attached to some kind of machine so that he appears to fly toward the bank. I don’t know why Spike Lee is so into that gimmick, but I love him for it.

Ken Leung, who was one of the main characters in Spike’s cable-pilot-turned-DTV-joint SUCKER FREE CITY, has a small role in this one. There’s also a shot most people won’t be able to decipher where a guy is asleep holding what appears to be some kind of rocket. If you’ve seen SUCKER FREE CITY though you know it’s The Bomb, a popular malt liquor that comes in a bottle shaped like an atom bomb. I think Spike is getting better at satirizing pop culture than he was a few years ago when he did BAMBOOZLED. Somehow in this one he manages to work in a great jab at Grand Theft Auto type video games.

Later there’s a scene where some hostages have been released and instead of feeling safe they’re then cuffed and manhandled by the cops who need to interview them, and they’re thrown on a bus just like they would’ve been if the thieves had gotten the bus to the airport they demanded. You don’t see that in your usual hostage drama and I thought, “a ha, this is a Spike Lee joint.”

There’s one regrettable part where for some reason they have to make a joke about a rabbi being an expert in diamonds. Get it, because jews know about diamonds. If you see the movie you’ll see why it’s even more out of place than it sounds. In other ways though the movie makes attempts to reach out to other cultures. There’s a character who’s a Sikh who’s very pissed off about being lumped in with Arabs and about getting his turban pulled off by cops. Unfortunately not everybody in the audience is ready to accept this message. A gal in front of me laughed hysterically, I think she even thought it was supposed to be funny.

(Note: NEVER go to an opening night show of a Denzel Washington/Jodi Foster movie. When you think about people talking at movies maybe you think of obnoxious young people, but in my experience the worst are always us so-called grownups. A movie with a cast like this attracts all the retards that go to movies once every five years. The people who have to ask out loud “What is he doing?” and “Why is he doing that?” and “Wh-uuuut?” and “What did he say?” instead of, you know, watching the god damn movie and finding out what will happen like everybody else.)

For the record, this movie has the all time greatest use of a photograph of George and Barbara Bush in the background of a shot. I invite anybody to try to top it, but this one is good. There are alot of good little moments. Maybe my favorite scene isn’t important to the plot at all. It’s where Clive Owen has a friendly (and not even threateningly friendly, I don’t think) conversation with the video game playing 12 year old Brooklyn kid who is the youngest hostage. They eat pizza together sitting in the vault, using blocks of money as stools. That’s the biggest hint that the robbery is something other than what it appears. If the trailer didn’t tip you off. Or the fact that this is a movie.

See, although it has alot of nice touches of realism and insight, ultimately this is not the real world. This is Hollywood New York, where people can stage elaborate and fanciful robberies if they’ve got enough gimmicks and plot twists and surprise motivations in their arsenal. It doesn’t feel like a CLOCKERS type deal where it’s heavily researched and presents a different version of police work than what you’ve seen in other movies. It feels more like a standard Hollywood thriller with that sort of thing glazed over the top.

So the success of the movie comes down to the exact thing those talking knuckleheads above probaly came to the movie for – the High Wattage Cast, especially Clive and Denzel.

I never noticed Clive until SIN CITY but between that and CROUPIER I think we all know he knows what he’s doing. This character is lightly sketched but he adds alot to it with that deep narrator voice (handy for some Spike-Lee-talking-right-to-the-camera scenes as well as making his demands to negotiators) and although he’s a serious villain I think he also gives an indication of being actually a pretty nice guy when not taking innocent people hostage.

And then there’s Denzel. I don’t know what to say about him that you don’t already know. Obviously he’s gonna be intense and intelligent, self righteous at times, funny and charming at other times. He tones down the intensity a little from TRAINING DAY mode but is still playing a typical Denzel character. This is one of his characters who wears nice suits and hats. You know the type. What makes it stand out though is this time he’s teamed with Chiwetel Ejiofor, the bad guy from SERENITY. They’re well matched partners with complete respect for each other, they have a rapport where they joke and make each other laugh like real friends, not like wacky partners in a movie. They’re always on the same page, they never get in dramatic arguments or shit like that. There’s nothing revolutionary about their characters but the chemistry of the two of them together is so good I’d almost like to see their characters return in another movie with a completely different case.

But the best thing about the movie: coughing. I’ve been looking for this, I’ve been demanding this since my FINDING NEVERLAND review. I want a movie where a character coughs and it doesn’t mean that he or she is gonna die. INSIDE MAN is that movie. There’s at least two scenes where Denzel stops to cough between lines, and it has no plot purpose. It’s just him coughing. As people sometimes do.

the end (cough)

[ratings]

So what Robert Rodriguez did for this comic strip SIN CITY, he actually brought in the writer/cartoonist from the comic, made him co-director, and apparently pretty much used the comic as storyboards and script. He used his cool digital movie cameras and convinced a great cast to come in and fuck around in front of green screens and used computers for almost all the backgrounds. According to my team of expert nerds, there are scenes and lines from the funny pages that they cut out here and there and they mixed things together a little bit at the beginning in order to combine three stories into one. But for the most part the shots are based on the drawings and everything written on the page is said out loud in the movie. An obsessive level of faithfulness never thought possible even by Harry Knowles himself. Maybe the most faithful movie adaptation of anything ever, including plays, novels and trading cards.

So what this is is a very ballsy and ridiculous experiment, like Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO. Like most experiments in science, it’s a big failure. But you gotta fuck up in order to invent cancer or whatever. I’m glad these guys did it anyway even though it really doesn’t work.

Based on my detailed research beforehand, I was a little skeptical going in, and I think my hunch was right. See, the comic strip is drawn in stark black and white in order to look like film noir. But then the movie is done with high tech digital effects and makeup in order to look like the comic. Not like film noir. You see the problem here? It’s like a snake eating its tail, or I guess probaly a tail shitting out a snake’s head. The whole concept don’t make sense.

And that’s the problem here. It would be the greatest, most fucked up hard boiled film noir of all time, if it just felt like a film noir. But it doesn’t, it feels like a cartoon. It’s like they pulled that movie Dick Tracy into the side of a van and beat it unconscious with a brick. Then they sucked all the color out with a rubber tube, shot it full of PCP, tossed it on the side of the road, then dumped cold water on it and burned rubber. So this fucked up zombie Dick Tracy wakes up all confused and then goes on a rampage. That’s what Sin City is. It’s pretty funny and cool to watch Dick Tracy running around crazy like that, and it makes you think about noir and hard boiled and pulp. But you can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s still stupid Dick Tracy.

Let’s try that in one sentence. Dick Tracy is to Sin City as Nick Nolte is to Nick Nolte mug shot.

The movie is basically three pulp novel stories, each one about a narrating bad motherfucker who gets into some shit. In backwards order you got my man Bruce as Hartigan, a retired cop who saves a little girl from being molested, but gets blamed for it himself, then has to fight some mutated yellow dude. You got Clive Owen as Dwight, a dude with a goofy overcoat who stops Benicio Del Toro from fucking with his girlfriend, a fight that escalates to involve a severed head, the mafia and an army of heavily armed hookers (one of them a ninja). And then you got Mickey Rourke as Marv, a huge, hulking, ugly, schizophrenic lug who wakes up next to a dead hooker (the only woman who was ever nice to him) and knows that getting revenge on the killer will mean his death, and that it will be absolutely worth it.

I really liked all three characters and the actors playing them. They’re all narrating pretty much nonstop, which usually doesn’t work in movies, but works pretty good here. They talk mean as hell and they sound like they mean it. In concept, my favorite is Marv, a fucker so tough (SPOILER IN THIS SENTENCE) he says, “Is that the best you pansies can do?” after a jolt of the ol’ electric chair. But there’s a problem, a real big problem. They want him to look like the drawing in the comic book, so they got Mickey Rourke under all this makeup. He looks like the amazing human Hellboy.

And that’s what I’m trying to say, that’s the whole problem of this movie. I have talked to my nerd research team and I have even gone so far as to browse the comic strips with my own two eyes. And this is what I discovered. When you’re reading those things all you got is drawings, so the drawings become a real world. You’re looking at this drawing of Marv, and that’s Marv, that’s the real guy, in a real world. Even though there’s pictures, it’s like books. You gotta imagine stuff. But when you see the movie, what you see is what you get. And what you get is a dude in cartoony lookin makeup. You don’t think of him as a real guy who looks like that. You think of him as a fuckin muppet. And muppets just aren’t all that gritty.

I liked the stories, although the third one didn’t make alot of sense. My team tells me in the comic book it’s more clear that the girl is in hiding and that’s why Hartigan can find her but the bad guys can’t, and it’s explained how he got out of prison and also I guess the yellow bastard has his dong hangin out the whole time. But I didn’t read the comic, I saw the movie, so I wish it made more sense. Other than that the stories got a good pulp feel with nice details and twists and lots of great tough guy lines, especially in the narration.

And I liked pretty much the whole cast. Other than the three main anti-heroes my favorite was Benicio of the Bull, who talks in a scary gravelly voice but it gets higher when he gets his throat slashed. Britney Murphy’s pretty funny too. The whole crowd laughed at her melodramatic delivery of the line, “Dwight ya fool – ya DAMN FOOL!” Marv got the crowd going too. He got the best lines and the best violence.

If you put it all down on paper you would figure I’d have to love this movie. It’s got revenge and intrigue and mayhem and extreme violence. It’s got people run over by cars, people jumpin through windshields, two different people with their heads dunked in toilets. It’s got hookers, a whole bunch of severed heads, a whole bunch of impalements and cut off hands and trunks full of chopped up bodies. Guns, swords, axes, knives, explosives, bows and arrows, a hungry wolf, some razor wire. It’s got sinking in tar and jumping off ledges and punching into walls and Elijah Wood from the hobbits movies as a mute, cannibal serial killer martial arts expert. Marv’s parole officer is Carla Gugino, Karen Sisco #2 herself, and she spends most of the movie naked. They got corrupt politicians and religious leaders and they even got em played by Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer. And it’s shot in real nice black and white with some nice select uses of color (a pupil here, some blood there). And it’s got Bruce Willis with a big scar on his head punching a guy until his face is mush. I mean how could this movie not be a god damn masterpiece?

I’ll tell you how, because they treat this comic book shit too literally. And it was brave and it was cool and it usually looks great, but it just doesn’t work as a movie. They got all these striking shadows, they got a jail cell straight out of German expressionism, they got weird white silhouettes and neon white blood but they also got Mickey Rourke and Nick Stahl wearing Dick Tracy makeup, they got all this violence that looks like a cartoon. Body parts chop off like butter and people jump off buildings like Batman and when people get punched you don’t feel like they’re really getting punched. They’re just getting vibrated on a green screen.

They did a good job on the cars. When they’re driving around in cars or standing on a dock, it looks like Sin City is a real place. But most of the rest of the time they look like they’re doing just exactly what they’re really doing, which is standing in front of a computer drawn background. You don’t really buy this as being a real world. Most of the time it seems like they’re performing a play with fancy video effects.

In a real film noir they’d have a set, they’d have a soundstage, it would seem like a real place. A real dark, shadowy black and white place. Sin City is not a place most of the time. It’s a background.

So more than anything I think what they’ve accomplished here is they’ve proven sort of a suspicion I’ve had for a long time but never thought would be proven so scientifically. And that is that you can’t just translate something 100% literally and expect it to work. You gotta recognize that books are books and movies are movies and you gotta be true to what’s good about each one but you can’t expect them to be identical twins. Because if they are they’ll be fucked up identical twins like those pervert gynecologists with the weird tools. What’s gruesome and badass in a drawing might just be silly in a movie. We know that for sure now.

I wish there was a movie exactly like this but not cartoony. It can be over the top and fantastical but as long as it feels REAL. It’s hard to be gritty and grimy when you’re made out of pixels. I think they were trying to make a movie that was much more tough and hardcore and brutal than this ends up being just because it all feels so phoney and cartoony.

But oh well. As much as it’s a failure, there’s still nothing like Sin City. This is a weird fuckin movie that will probaly scare away many people and fascinate many others. I might even go see it again on the theory that once you have accepted somebody’s flaws you can then get to love them for their true self. Who knows, it might even grow on me. But for now it’s a weird, fucked up, half badass, half cartoon network oddity.