Sin City DVD > Reviews > Black Hole Fun

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Outstanding
Soundtrack	Average

Advantages:	Looks great, nice transfer
Disadvantages:	Slow pace at times, can get dull, light on extras

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Adapting a graphic novel for the screen will always be a tricky concept. Contending with the rabid fanboys is your first obstacle followed by what to take from the book and what to throw out. Robert Rodriguez has been a one-man film studio for a while now and decided to literally take what was on the page and put it on the screen. The result is Sin City, a visually stunning movie but one that's not as good as you may have heard.

Sin City is an urban sprawl of dark alleys, seedy bars, violence, disturbing characters and general nastiness. The film takes several stories and puts them up on the screen. Each one of them follows characters that are off the beaten track. You have a bear of a man all disfigured on a violent rampage of revenge. A burned out cop looking to take out a sick child molester. A group of bar dancers who own their neighbourhood and fight anyone who trys to muscle in. There's also Elijah Wood as a very creep cold-blooded killer but you wouldn't think it if you looked at him. I'm only touching the surface, as there's a great deal of stuff going on. Needless to say I found Sin City to be one of the most violent films I've ever seen on the big screen.

Read the majority of reviews and you'll find that the general consensus on Sin City is that it's an original cinematic experience. I can't disagree with that, the visuals are not conventional and some the general look of the film is outstanding but it's also a flaw of the film. Spending two hours in this visual feast get's quite tiresome after a while. The pacing of the film is not as breakneck as you'd expect from a comic book movie. In fact I found large parts of the movie tended to drag as you got a lot of voice-over rather than having characters use dialogue to move the story forward.

Being a fan of Rodriguez and Tarantino I expected the film to have a bit more sparkle in the story department as well as some excitement. For me Sin City tries to hard to look cool rather than looking at what could have been trimmed out to keep the film tight. The hype for me wasn't justified, I'm not saying the film is bad, it's just not the awesome spectacle that you may have been lead to believe.

Sin City was worth seeing on the big screen. The print I saw was digitally projected and one of the best cinematic experiences I've had from a technical standpoint. So now that opportunity has been and gone you'll have to find the film on DVD. I expected the film to look good on the small screen and it didn't fail me. Quite a lot of the film was digitally created so as you'd expect the noir look of the film is faithfully reproduced for the home cinema. You'll struggle to find anything wrong with what's on show here and I can't find anything negative to write about the transfer.

The sound mix is equal to the picture quality. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS soundtracks carry enough weight to keep the neighbours annoyed when cranked up lout. Every explosion, every punch, every rasping piece of bass from Mickey Rourke's voice is faithfully reproduced.

Now obviously this is a film that could give you loads of information on how it was brought to screen and faithfully reproduced. But this initial release of Sin City is not for the fans of the film. Instead of a wealth of extras you get a slight featurette that doesn't share much in it's 10-minute run time. It's a real downer if you're a DVD fan and would love to know how the film was put together.

Therefore it was no surprise that a director's edition of the film would be announced. The R1 release will be available ion December and carry an extended version of the film as well as a ton of extras and a copy of the original Sin City graphic novel. If you want to get the film on DVD then I'd certainly wait for this release rather than forking out for the one currently on the shelves.

Sin City didn't blow me away, maybe I'll revisit it in time and change my opinion. At this moment in time I feel it's a film with more style than substance.