Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2185 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-08-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 124 minutes

Amazon.com
Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books. In the first of three separate but loosely related stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke in heavy makeup) tries to track down the killers of a woman who ended up dead in his bed. In the second story, Dwight's (Clive Owen) attempt to defend a woman from a brutal abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens to destroy the uneasy truce among the police, the mob, and the women of Old Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last day on the job (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a kidnapper, but is himself thrown in jail. Years later, he has a chance to save her again.

Read our interview with Frank Miller.

Based on three of Miller's immensely popular and immensely gritty books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard), Sin City is unquestionably the most faithful comic-book-based movie ever made. Each shot looks like a panel from its source material, and director Rodriguez (who refers to it as a "translation" rather than an adaptation) resigned from the Directors Guild so that Miller could share a directing credit. Like the books, it's almost entirely in stark black and white with some occasional bursts of color (a woman's red lips, a villain's yellow face). The backgrounds are entirely digitally generated, yet not self-consciously so, and perfectly capture Miller's gritty cityscape. And though most of Miller's copious nudity is absent, the violence is unrelentingly present. That may be the biggest obstacle to viewers who aren't already fans of the books and who may have been turned off by Kill Bill (whose director, Quentin Tarantino, helmed one scene of Sin City). In addition, it's a bleak, desperate world in which the heroes are killers, corruption rules, and the women are almost all prostitutes or strippers. But Miller's stories are riveting, and the huge cast--which also includes Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Michael Clarke Duncan, Devin Aoki, Carla Gugino, and Josh Hartnett--is just about perfect. (Only Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen, while very well-suited to their roles, seem hard to separate from their established screen personas.) In what Rodriguez hopes is the first of a series, Sin City is a spectacular achievement. --David Horiuchi

More Sin City at Amazon.com

The Graphic Novels and Books	Films by Robert Rodriguez	From Graphic Novel to Big Screen
The Soundtrack	Films by guest director Quentin Tarantino	Crime on DVD

From The New Yorker
A few strands of melodrama have been pulled from Frank Miller's graphic novels and plaited together-just about-into a coherent comic-strip film. Miller himself co-directs, in collaboration with Robert Rodriguez (plus a little help from Quentin Tarantino), and there is certainly no letup, or pulled punches, in the heightening of style. The movie is in monochrome, splashed with occasional color, and the sheer force of overkill-the ear-crunching sound level, the disturbingly joyful violence-turns a sequence of horrific events into a stream of unfeeling comedy. The plots offer vengeance upon vengeance: cops against child-killers, cops against priests, hookers against cops, thugs against everybody. The cast is a blast, including Bruce Willis, Michael Madsen, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, a bewitching Carla Gugino, and a renascent Mickey Rourke. Most of them enter with sweat and gusto into the spirit of the thing-fortunately so, for without such eagerness the movie would feel merely cruel. What it has to tell us of life, let alone suffering, beyond the savage enchantment of the movies could be written on the head of a bullet.-A.L. (4/11/05) (Battery Park 11, Chelsea Cinemas, Cinemas 1, 2, and 3, 84th Street Sixplex, Empire 25, Kips Bay Theatre, Magic Johnson Theatres, Orpheum VII, 34th Street Theatre, and Union Square.) -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Sin City DVD
This movie is great. I had a hard time getting it here. I ordered the first from and independent person selling on Amazon. They canceled it on me and said nothing...I waited and waited and thought it got lost in the mail, then tried tracking it and found it hadn't been sent because the one they had got damaged. No one told me though. They had even refunded my money without a word to me. I reordered it from the actual Amazon as a new product and had it in 2 business days. I'd say if you're going to buy something...just buy it from Amazon's wharehouse, it's safer.

High POW Factor and Overloaded Extras in the Collector's Edition DVD Set Make for Audacious Thrill Ride Into Sin City
A visually audacious movie and an unpredictably wild ride into palookaville, this is one unique film viewing experience. I am not familiar with Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, but my guess is that Miller, who shares a co-director credit with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, has remained faithful in capturing the hard-boiled, crime-infested world of Basin City and its cynical inhabitants. This 2005 film takes a visual cue from 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow by green-screening the backdrops and using digitally-produced images as the landscape, but that's where the similarity ends. Instead of Sky Captain's sepia shadings, this one is in vividly rendered black-and-white with carefully selected splashes of color (perhaps inspired by Steven Spielberg's use of a red coat in the otherwise black-and white Schindler's List). It evokes the perfect feeling for its modern-day film noir sensibilities which includes pulp fiction-type dialogue and a rogue's gallery of exaggerated characters, some made up in prosthetics to make you think you've landed in the dark side of a Dick Tracy comic strip. But Miller's world feels much different, at once capturing the cartoonish, highly stylized violence of Quentin Tarnatino's films (he is identified as "Special Guest Director" though I'm unclear what he exactly did) and the special effects-driven black humor of Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her (which coincidentally starred Bruce Willis).

The plot revolves around three separate stories that share some of the supporting characters but little more than that story-wise. Continuing to improve and deepen with age, Willis plays a tough-talking cop named Hartigan in the first one. Just before accepting his pension, he pursues one last case to save an 11-year old girl from the clutches of a murderous psychopath who happens to be the son of a US senator. The girl grows up to be a stripper, played blandly by a Lolita-esque Jessica Alba. Completely unrecognizable as the actor who once enticed and coerced Kim Basinger in Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks, Mickey Rourke portrays Marv, a contract killer who falls in love with a beautiful hooker who is murdered in her sleep. His journey in finding her killer creates the most concurrently harrowing and darkly hilarious joyride in the movie, replete with decapitated heads of beautiful women mounted on a wall, a mute psycho-killer played by Elijah Wood (stunt casting for sure but intriguing in exposing a dark side to his Frodo persona) and a comic electric-chair execution scene. Rourke is a revelation, grotesquely ugly and built like a Mac truck but strangely insightful and impervious to what happens to his character.

The third story is the most surreal with a monotone-voiced Clive Owen, an almost heroic fugitive named Dwight, who saves a mouthy barmaid (an annoying Brittany Murphy) and a gang of empowered prostitutes (led by his former lover played in convincing dominatrix fashion by Rosario Dawson) from a corrupt cop. A Cyrano-nosed Benicio del Toro portrays the cop with his trademark fiery menace in what feels like a throwback to his career before Traffic. Dead people don't stay dead in any of the stories, but in this one, the concept is taken to an extreme, and the clutches between Owen and Dawson amid the violence provide a surprisingly amusing touch. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and it's nice to see some otherwise under-the-radar actors get a chance to chew on some scenery in atypical roles, chief among them Carla Gugino as a perennially nude lesbian parole officer, Nick Stahl as the senator's son who becomes the comically disgusting Yellow Bastard, and in seething, whatever-happened-to-them cameos, Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer.

All the ingredients are so over-the-top that I was hoping the three stories would synthesize more than they do perhaps in the hope of a greater untapped theme. Moreover, for a movie so dependent on style to sustain itself over its two-hour-plus running time, it does feel a bit overlong and at times, repetitive in its visual elements. After all, one can take in only so many severed heads and limbs and heads shoved in toilets, as well as the inordinate amount of blood splattering in colors ranging from red to white to yellow. But no matter, as Rodriguez and Miller have fashioned something quite startling and entertaining here, a comic book come to life. Not for everyone's tastes but this is fun for those willing to take the ride. The incremental value of the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set over the standard single disc will depend on whether you have become obsessed with this cult film since there is only a behind-the-scenes featurette on the single disc.

Disc One contains the 124-minute, theatrical-release version with an excessive three audio commentaries. The first is with Rodriguez and Miller, who focus mainly on the book-to-screen translation and benefits from the author's perspective. The second has Tarantino and Willis join Rodriguez, and the focus turns to the technical aspects of the production even though Tarantino's contribution to the film is marginal at best. The third commentary track is actually the recording of the audience reaction at the movie's Austin première in order to replicate the experience one would have had at the theater. The remaining extras on Disc One may seem superfluous if you already sat through the first two commentary tracks. Six featurettes are offered - a five-minute short on how Miller and Rodriguez got together ("How It Went Down: Convincing Frank Miller to Make the Film"); seven minutes on Tarantino's contribution to "The Big Fat Kill" segment ("Special Guest Director, Quentin Tarantino"); seven minutes on the vintage 1950's cars used in the film; en minutes focused mainly on the weaponry; nine minutes with special makeup effects supervisor Greg Nicotero on how the looks of the principal characters were achieved; and finally, nine minutes with costume supervisor Nina Proctor about the stylized clothing. There is an odd feature on Disc One, "Sin-Chroni-City Interactive", which allows you to pick characters and locations and get a timeline view of relevant events. Disc One ends with two theatrical trailers.

Disc Two contains the 147-minute version of the film advertised as "recut, extended, and unrated". The additional 23 minutes amount to expanded cuts in each episode which allow them to be presented as separate short films. This gives you the option to watch the film as an integrated whole or separately. Each segment has its own menu of scene selections. From a story standpoint, the incremental value of the footage and flexibility is marginal at best. Five more featurettes fill up Disc Two - a twelve-minute short called "15 Minute Flic School" in which Rodriguez shares behind-the-scenes information and basic tricks of the trade; ten minutes where the entire film is shown in accelerated fashion to show how the actors had to improvise in front of green screens; a 17-minute piece on Tarantino's shooting of his scene; and most dispensable, nine minutes of a concert from Willis and his band the Accelerators at Antone's nightclub in Austin, and six minutes of Rodriguez sharing his recipe for "Sin City" breakfast tacos (seriously!). Beyond the discs is the complete Sin City graphic novel in printed form, The Hard Goodbye (Sin City, Book 1: Second Edition).

Living Breathing Comic Book
I haven't read the graphic novels, so I can't really disagree with someone who trashes this movie because it might be unfaithful to the source material. I'm usually hard on film adaptations of books I love.

I loved this movie. It's big, ridiculous, cheesy, loud, and the dialogue is complete camp. I never saw any film that came closer to being a comic book than this. It's really incredible. I can't say it's a great film, I mean, the characters are paper-thin, the plot is strictly pulp novel potboiler stuff. The acting was all way over the top. The whole movie was, in fact, way over the top. But for those who grew up reading comics, it's an absolute gas. This movie was about as fun to watch as any I've ever seen. Despite it's grotesque violence, it really appeals to the kid in me!