Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s series of Sin City graphic novels is the latest link in an already hefty chain of films that try to overcome a lack of substance with an abundance of style. Although substantially better than Kerry Conran’s awful Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (USA), and international empty but pretty pictures Casshern (Japan) and Immortel (France), Sin City still suffers from fundamental structural problems that no amount of technical excellence or special effects can overcome. It lacks a clear plot, is inhabited by too many characters (for someone other than Robert Altman to contend with), and relies on an irritating amount of narration. Furthermore, the acting varies from excellent (Benicio Del Toro as “Jackie Boy”) through mediocre (Bruce Willis as the stone faced “Hartigan”) to embarrassingly bad (Jessica Alba as “Nancy”), and the directing, though adequate, is too concerned with recreating comic book frames than adding to them.
Filmmakers should know that what works in one medium rarely works in another. It’s the reason that many film adaptations of Shakespeare fail to work convincingly on the silver screen, or that many faithful adaptations of popular novels don’t have nearly the same power as the original works. Judging from his El Mariachi days, Robert Rodriguez should know, for example, that films are best when they rely on action and visual exposition over narration and dialogue. In his excellent book “The Technique of Screenplay Writing”, Eugene Vale makes the distinction that film, a medium physically based on motion and progression, should exploit exactly these qualities. He compares the same scene, of a warrior in battle dress, as done in a painting and literature, and points out that a painting shows all of its information at once while a story is better suited to reveal information progressively. According to Vale, a film, like literature, should show its warrior actually fasten the leather straps of his boots, throw his heavy shield over his shoulder and clutch his spear rather than simply the resulting image. In other words, good films make visual the process. In Sin City, Rodriguez resorts too often to narration by his three main characters (Hartigan, Marv and Dwight) in order to give their histories, tell their thoughts, or soften and explain the jump cuts that he uses repeatedly. Although this is done to simulate the reading of a comic, which is made of several hundred frames and cannot convey everything through images, it is not suitable for a film like Sin City, which contains roughly 180,000 frames. The argument could be made that Rodriguez simply doesn’t have enough space, or time, to show everything, but that itself shows flaws in the film’s structure. And, furthermore, there are copious action and driving scenes that drag on for far too long and that cannot be justified only because they were in the original material.
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