SIN CITY (RECUT, EXTENDED, UNRATED) DVD (Digitally Obsessed): December 27, 2005
Review By: Rich Rosell
“This is blood for blood. And by the gallon. These are the old days, the bad days, the all or nothing days. They’re back. There’s no choice left. And I’m ready for war.” – Marv (Mickey Rourke)
MPAA Rating: Not Rated for ustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including language
Run Time: 02h:27m:00s
Release Date: December 13, 2005
Genre: action
DVD Review
There has been a lot of ballyhoo about this extended version of Sin City, because on paper the new take runs approximately 147 minutes, while the original theatrical cut was a mere 124 minutes. I’m no math whiz, but that comes out to around twenty minutes plus of extra runtime, though in actuality this ends up being like one of those optical illusions where what you see isn’t always what you get.
It may seem a tad confusing, but instead of one long film made up of four loosely interwoven stories running longer, director Robert Rodriguez has chosen to split things out into four separate pieces, each with their own separate opening and closing credit sequences. That’s where the bulk of the extra runtime comes from, and what happens in terms of actual new footage there only really ends up being about four or five minutes. But don’t bitch too loudly, because from a purely artistic standpoint, the end product now matches the vision of comic god Frank Miller even more so.
The heart and soul, no matter how it’s sliced and diced, is still here. In spades. Rodriguez took Miller’s Sin City books—all set in the crime-riddled, shadowy and perpetually rainy Basin City—and has strung them together, daisychained by overlapping characters to tell separate stories about corruption, doublecrosses and murder that are rich with coarse noir dialogue and graphic violence that straddles the line between being purely over-the-top, layered with broad swipes of gallows humor. Towering hulk Marv (Mickey Rourke), honest cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis) and vengeful Dwight McCarthy (Clive Owen) are the leads for the individual tales, and the multitude of character crossovers tie them all together in vague ways, such as Jessica Alba as stripper Nancy Callahan or Brittany Murphy’s cocky waitress Shellie.
And for this “recut, extended, unrated” version, the stories now come divvied as mini-films unto themselves, watchable in any order you wish. The original theatrical release is still here on this set (on disc one), but over on disc two is where Rodriguez reassembles them as The Customer Is Always Right (08m:25s), The Hard Goodbye (40m:57s), That Yellow Bastard (47m:26s) and The Big Fat Kill (44m:45s). And as I said earlier, do not break out into a cold sweat nitpicking about how many measurable feet of new footage actually show up here, because the opportunity to see these tales more as they were originally written (as seperate stories, that is) has to count for something just as vitally important. And we get a little more Miho, too.
This is pitch black noir, with characters so ridiculously pulpy and violent that it is really quite stunning and a bit overwhelming to take it in at one time. Another plus for the four separate stories concept. In what is simply an amazing technical achievement, Rodriguez has moved a mountain by creating a black-and-white comic book world with occasional color accents (hello, Alexis Bledel!) that is about as hardboiled as anything can possibly be hardboiled.
There are so many perfect moments in Sin City—the reflective glasses of Elijah Wood’s murderous Kevin or an aerial shot of Hartigan’s jail cell—that are lifted directly from Miller’s books, that one could compare screenshots with the comic and actually have trouble differentiating between the two. Rodriguez has said that he storyboarded every single frame in the film, meaning he looked to Miller’s work and opted to use that vision for the look of the film. It’s actually kind of difficult to take in all of the visuals that Rodriguez has put together in just one sitting, much like reading one of Miller’s books requires multiple reads to fully digest.
This is dark noir comic art of the highest order.
Rating for Style: A+
Rating for Substance: A+