4-13-05, 8:46 am

Movie Review: Sin City

Three men, unknown to each other and in three self-contained mini-plots, are on a hunt to find a serial murderer, a serial child rapist and killer, and a violent thug who brutally assaults women. After intensive investigations their sources give up just one name, leading them to the same place: Roark. Roark is the name of two powerful brothers whom no one dares to cross. One is a Catholic Cardinal (Rutger Hauer), the other is a Senator (Powers Boothe). Both are protecting the culprits for their own purposes and wield the massive power of the police to protect their interests. Extreme violence, graphic gore and sexualized scenarios are the plot elements that drive this story along. Even so, the violence is stylized as abstract and ordinary – a powerful reflection of an American society that commits frequent mass shootings in high schools, funds killer cops, consents to a government that has institutionalized inhumanity and brutality, ignores bombings at women’s clinics, chuckles at right-wing vigilantism, weeps at terrorism, and operates a military industrial complex led by a president that has downplayed the slaughter of innocents in the war in Iraq. It is a brutal film about a brutal society.

There is a bright side, I think. While the powerful exploit the powerless, the exploited value personal loyalty and the intimacy of friendships and close relationships. Intimacy for the exploiters is violent, sexualized, even cannibalistic. And betrayal marks one as on the side of evil – if such a fine line can be easily staked out.

Does Sin City glorify violence? I’ll leave that to the pundits. But if you listen to them carefully, the pundits glorify violence constantly: whether in providing banal justifications for a war that has killed over 100,000 people, in their uncritical opposition to the control of firearms, or perhaps in their love for the death penalty.

See Sin City, or read a newspaper.



--Roberta Jones reviews movies and music for Political Affairs and may be reached via -mail at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.