Sometimes it means killing a whole lotta people.” Marv, a grizzled behemoth embodied underneath a ton of facial make-up by the incomparable Mickey Rourke, is a bruiser seeking revenge against the powerful men-ultimately revealed to be cannibalistic clergymen (Rutger Hauer and Elijah Wood) with a taste for whores-responsible for the death of a beatific, golden-haired hooker named Goldie (Jaime King) who had generously given Marv the night of his life. Yet any fanboy with an affinity for noir or Miller’s acerbic work will savor its reimagining of hard-boiled ’40s-era crime fiction as a brutal and caustically funny gonzo netherworld of (to reference another Sin City tome) booze, broads, and bullets.Įach of Sin City’s male protagonists embarks upon a homicidal, potentially fatal quest to rescue, defend, or avenge the death of a good woman, guided by a principle of loyalty articulated by Clive Owen’s ex-con Dwight: “You gotta stand up for your friends. Such dogged accuracy, when coupled with the film’s gorgeously artificial, wholly computer-concocted landscapes, is disorienting at first, and those not receptive to extreme cinematic stylization and self-consciousness may bristle at this adaptation’s blatant disinterest in realism. Miller’s books function not as jumping-off points but as blueprints (or storyboards) for the film’s trio of rain-drenched, blood-soaked tales, and the result is that his trademark close-ups (in which only harried eyes are illuminated by swathes of light), sultry, writhing femme fatales (commonly sans clothing), and white silhouettes against jet-black backgrounds are exactingly transposed on screen. Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (co-directed by Miller himself) translates three of these acclaimed novels ( The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard) verbatim, using cutting-edge digital technology and a star-studded cast decked out in racy outfits and outrageous prosthetics to precisely recreate Miller’s illustrations and prose as they appear on the page. As in Miller’s portrait of Batman in 1986’s groundbreaking The Dark Night Returns, these men are sometimes profane, often vicious, completely cynical, and intimately aware that the surest (and likely only) route to redemption is through pain, suffering, and sacrifice. Fashioned from superhero lore and Dashiell Hammett, the writer’s antiheros-part Superman and part Phillip Marlowe-are both noble and flawed, gallantly trying to effect change against a cruel, inequitable social order.
Yet Miller’s cynicism is tempered by hope, his leggy female characters stronger and more resilient than their skimpy outfits let on, and his hulking he-men more sensitive and vulnerable than their brawny exteriors would suggest.
His gritty books are at once stringently faithful to, and exaggerated augmentations of, their gloomy genre’s most hallowed tropes: a stark combination of clichéd staccato dialogue, severely sharp shadows, and swift, ferocious violence shot up with a dose of adrenalized nastiness.
#ROBERT MILLER VEEER SERIES#
Legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller’s Sin City series is pulpy noir on steroids, amplified black-and-white visions of seedy, nightmarish urbanity in which dangerous men consume only steaks and brews, women are either angelic “babes” or tough “dames,” and cops, clergymen, and politicians hungrily wallow in the corrupt mire.
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