Sin City

Sin City is a 2005 Noir thriller film adapted from the comics anthology of the same name by Frank Miller, co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself (who also has a small role in it). The film features an All-Star Cast, including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Elijah Wood, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Jaime King, Rosario Dawson, and many, many more.

The film comprises three stories from the original comics anthology, and is bookended by an adaptation of "The Customer is Always Right", a short story featured in the Booze, Broads and Bullets collection. In The Hard Goodbye, ex-convict Marv goes on a one-man revenge quest to avenge the prostitute he loved. In The Big Fat Kill, the loner Dwight gets involved in a gang war between cops and the city's Red Light District. And in That Yellow Bastard, cop John Hartigan tries to save a girl from a serial killer and his powerful senator father.

Rodriguez quit the Director's Guild to let Miller take co-director status.^note The Director's Guild refused to give joint credit to two directors not previously established as a team, especially since Miller had never directed before. Rodriguez originally planned to give full credit to Miller, but Miller turned this down. Quentin Tarantino, a friend of Rodriguez, was also given a co-director credit since he came over on a day of shooting to film a scene. Rodriguez shot the film panel-for-panel from the comics, using black and white footage and Green Screen backgrounds to get the perfect Sin City feel. The end result was a film Rodriguez considered "less of an adaptation than a translation"; as such, there is no official writer credit on the film.

A sequel, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, was released in August 2014, after a long stretch in Development Hell. Miller and Rodriguez returned as co-directors, and the film contains an official screenplay by Miller. Sadly, the deaths of two important actors — Brittany Murphy (Shelly) and Michael Clarke Duncan (Manute) — alongside Devon Aoki (Miho) taking time off from acting caused some difficulties. Duncan and Aoki were replaced by Dennis Haysbert and Jamie Chung, respectively, with Jeremy Piven taking over as Bob, and Josh Brolin taking over as Dwight.

The second film contains two original storylines not shown in the comics.

1: The Long Bad Night - Johnny is a young man with charm and great skill at slots and card games. Looking to make a name for himself in Sin City, he crashes a private poker game hosted by Senator Roark and cleans him out. However, considering who he just beat, Johnny's luck might not last the night.

2: Nancy's Last Dance - Four years after "That Yellow Bastard", Nancy still can't come to terms with Hartigan's suicide. She plunges into a self destructive spiral until she decides on what she must do. She has to kill the man responsible for Hartigan's death: the infamous Senator Roark himself.

Tropes specific to the film include:

• Actor Allusion:
  • When one cop advises another to kill Hartigan without hesitation, they're quickly dispatched and Hartigan quips "Good advice". In Die Hard, a terrorist who tells John McClane to kill without hesitation is offed, with McClane snarking "Thanks for the advice". Both played by Bruce Willis, lying on his back and shooting upwards both times. Frank Miller even said that he thought of that very scene from Die Hard when he drew that scenario in "That Yellow Bastard". Little did he know…
  • In the film of A Dame to Kill For, the way Hartigan's ghost talks to Nancy is very reminiscent of Bruce Willis's role in The Sixth Sense.
  • Christopher Meloni playing a cop with marital problems, anger issues, has a dim view of rape and eventually Jumps Off The Slippery Slope? Gee, where have we seen this before?
  • Gail calls Dwight 'Lancelot.' Around this time Clive Owen had also starred in King Arthur (2004), though playing Arthur and not Lancelot.
  • Jamie Chung takes up a sword to become a fearsome warrior in the second movie, around the time she was doing it in Once Upon a Time (2011) and after she did it in Sucker Punch.
  • Michael Madsen amusingly shows up right after someone else gets their ear blown off. Although this time he's the cop.
• Adapted Out:
  • The character of Mort (one of Basin City's few honest cops) was written out of the cinema version of That Yellow Bastard. In the comics, Mort is the own who picks Hartigan up outside the prison. In the movie, this was done by Bob. (The extended version still includes a scene where Mort visits Hartigan in hospital.) He does appear in the sequel, though.
  • Dwight's gluttonous Greek ally Agamemnon was omitted from the film A Dame to Kill For. Shelly was also omitted due to Brittany Murphy's untimely death.
• Adaptational Attractiveness:
  • An odd villain example. In the comic, the cannibalistic serial killer Kevin was a pudgy, middle-aged man with a five o' clock shadow and receding hairline◊. He ended up being played by Elijah Wood in the film. However, this probably makes him even eerier, since it's quite an inversion of how this is usually played.
  • Bob, a short, fat man, is played by Michael Madsen, and the even fatter Senator Roark played by Powers Boothe.
  • In the sequel, Joey, the fat adulterer that Dwight catches, is played by Ray Liotta.
• Adaptational Curves: Inverted with Nancy Callahan. She's drawn in the comics as an extremely curvaceous woman◊ with a very large bust, which particularly explains Hartigan's gob-smacked "She grew up and filled out" comments. In the film, she's played by the much skinnier◊ Jessica Alba. In modern modeling parlance, comic Nancy would be described as "thick", movie Nancy as "toned".
• Adaptational Modesty:
  • Nancy does not dance topless in the film due to a no-nudity clause from Jessica Alba.
  • Marv is nude in his sex scene with Goldie in The Hard Goodbye, while in the film he wears boxer shorts.
  • Dwight appears naked at the start of the original comic The Big Fat Kill, while he's practically fully clothed in the film.
  • The Yellow Bastard is naked when torturing Nancy near the end of his story. He was given shorts in the film.
  • Gail is naked when Manute kidnaps her in The Big Fat Kill, but is merely in her underwear in the film.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication: In The Big Fat Kill, the reason Dwight doesn't use his own car to transport the bodies of Jackie Boy and his cronies to the tar pits is because it doesn't have enough trunk space and it needs repairs, plus he fears that the cop that trailed Jackie-Boy to Old Town took his number plate and he'd draw attention driving in the rain with the top down. This isn't mentioned in the film.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
  • The movie moves Dwight's "Most people think Marv is crazy" monologue from A Dame to Kill For to The Hard Goodbye. This works fine in a standalone movie, but in the comics the chronology of that night is very well fleshed out. It's revealed that while Marv was drinking at Kadie's after Goldie's murder two cops were questioning Shellie about Dwight's whereabouts. At that point in the story Dwight is recovering from events in his own story, so he couldn't be anywhere near Kadie's that night. Furthermore, he underwent plastic surgery which gave Dwight his appearance in the movie but that only happened months after the events of The Hard Goodbye, at which point Marv was on Death Row. It seems the films has addressed this by altering the timeline to make the entirety of Dame to Kill For take place before Hard Goodbye.
  • There's also The Salesman, the assassin from "The Customer is Always Right," who later becomes The Colonel, the Big Bad of Hell and Back. Since The Colonel is dead by Boom, Headshot! (and quite deservedly so) at the end of Hell and Back and the events of The Big Fat Kill take place after that story, the Salesman doing to Becky what he did to his "customer" in the other story at the very end of the film adaptation can't exactly happen in Sin City canon unless someone else is the Colonel in the film adaptation of Hell and Back.
  • The first movie has a newspaper near the end of The Hard Goodbye showing a headline involving Senator Roark denouncing the death of his brother. The second movie has as a major plot point Nancy's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Senator Roark...with Marv's help—thus clearly setting that story before The Hard Goodbye.
  • Some liberties taken with a specific scene of the A Dame To Kill For film adaptation have created another plot hole. Originally, the rookie cops chasing Dwight and Marv into Old Town end up with their car riddled with bullets, but manage to run off on foot and avoid being killed. In the film, however, one of the girls flat out torches them with a flamethrower before they can get away. This...doesn't even begin to match up with the logic and rules set up in The Big Fat Kill, where the entire truce between Old Town and the police is threatened because a corrupt cop is killed by the girls of Old Town.
    Klump (to Shlubb): "I can only express puzzlement that borders on alarm."
  • The film version of That Yellow Bastard omits a scene where Hartigan sabotages Junior's car, which explains why he didn't use that as a getaway vehicle rather than heading for the docks.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Both in the sense of "body" and "soul" for Nancy. In Nancy's Last Dance, she puts herself through all kinds of degradation—drinking on stage, driving herself mad with rage and grief, cutting (and apparently dyeing) her hair, and cutting her own face to motivate Marv. Frankly, her last line in the film seems to imply she may not be able to return to her normal life.... However, Marv's presence emphasizes that this takes place before The Hard Goodbye—in which we see her back on stage, fully restored to her former glory.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Even by the standards of the already graphic series, some parts of the film can get grosser.
  • Marv and Manute's fight actually shows Marv ripping out his eye, while the book just showed Marv beating him.
  • In the comics, Lucille's severed hand is wrapped up in bandages. In the movie, we see the stitched up stump.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: In the film, a federal agent is used as a shield while Marv hacks up his teammates with a wood axe. This actually seems to be unintentional on Marv's part since he was busy killing one of the agents when the human shield ran into the path of the bullets.
• Casting Gag:
  • Ava and Damien Lord as an estranged husband and wife. They're played by Eva Green and Marton Csokas, former lovers who had already broken up.
  • Alexis Bledel plays a young woman with deep love and concern for her mother.
• Chewing the Scenery: There's quite a bit of it in the movie, but it works with the tone quite nicely. Junior though seems to do it the most to the point where you can practically see his teeth marks in the set, both before and after his Karmic Transformation into That Yellow Bastard.
• Chroma Key: Generally quite good in the movie, but a notable "jerkiness" occurs when Miho stabs several people through the head with her sword.
• Cold Open: The opening balcony scene.
• Colorblind Casting: Nancy, Jacki-Boy and Gail are played in the film by Jessica Alba (Latino), Benicio del Toro (Puerto Rican) and Rosario Dawson (Afro-Latino) respectively.
• Continuity Overlap: The movie has this with "The Hard Goodbye" and "The Big Fat Kill", as both take place on the same night, both protagonists pass at the same bar, and several characters (such as the prostitutes) appear in both. The same applies for Part 2 of "That Yellow Bastard" and "The Customer Is Always Right".
• Conversation Casualty: In the opening scene, when Josh Hartnett's character embraces the Lady in Red and confesses his love to her and then kills her with his silenced gun the very next moment.
• Cradling Your Kill: The Salesman does this in "The Customer is Always Right." Word of God states that the victim actually hired the assassin, and requested that he comfort her in her dying moments.
• Creator Cameo: Frank Miller played the priest.
• Creepy Monotone: Manute in the movie, more so with the sequel.
• Death by Adaptation: Nancy kills Senator Roark in the second film. This is an odd case in that while he's (apparently) still alive in the comics, this story was written specifically for the movie and doesn't really contradict the canon of the comics.
• Death by Cameo: Frank Miller has a cameo in the movie as a corrupt priest. Marv shoots him.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Rodriguez shot the using black and white footage and Green Screen backgrounds to get the perfect Sin City feel.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the original comic book, Becky gets gunned down alongside Manute's men by Dwight and the girls of Old Town. In the film, she escapes the ambush and it looks like she has survived. However, a coda at the end of the film shows her being cornered in an elevator at the hospital by the Professional Killer known as the Salesman. This forms a bookend with "The Customer is Always Right" vignette that opens the film.
• Exploitation Film: With a heavy dose of Film Noir for good measure.
• Fake Shemp: Used a lot due to how the movie was shot. Since most of it was green screen, characters could be added in after certain scenes had already been shot. For example, when Marv takes Wendy to Nancy's apartment, Jessica Alba had not been cast yet - so she was added in later. Likewise, Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood never met until the premiere - despite their characters interacting prominently in the movie.
• Family-Friendly Stripper: Nancy in the movie doesn't take her clothes off, whereas she's often dancing topless in the comics. Taken to the extreme in the sequel, where Nancy does normal stripper stuff like jumping the stage, spanking herself and getting on all fours yet the scene is played out as self-destructive behavior and Marv even leaves the bar disgusted by the raunchiness, even though it's pretty standard stripper stuff and she's not even topless.
• The Ghost: Mob boss Herr Wallenquist, despite his influence in the comics, never appears in the first movie. Finally seen in the sequel, played by Stacy Keach in heavy facial prosthetics making him unrecognizable and ugly.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Senator Roark may not get his comeuppance in That Yellow Bastard, but with Junior dead and Hartigan's suicide denying him revenge, he's still screwed. By the movie A Dame To Kill For, Roark's luck runs out as his reputation is first ruined by his (literal) bastard son, then he's killed by Nancy for what he did to Hartigan.
• Pragmatic Adaptation:
  • Arguably one of the best examples in a comic book movie. The stories are mostly frame-by-frame adaptations, right down to the cinematography. However, a lot of narration is chopped out, either in small trimmings (removing a fair bit of Frank Miller's infamous use of repetition) or in entire pages worth of backstory, commentary, etc. that would have bogged the movie down. It's done so smoothly that it's not noticeable unless you read along to the movie
  • In the book, Marv escapes from a cell by bull-rushing the door, slamming into it with his shoulder, over and over and over again, until he finally jars the bolt loose from the wall. This is implied to take at least an hour. Since this would have slowed down the movie intolerably, he instead simply wrenches the window bars out of the frame.
• Named by the Adaptation: In "Nancy's Last Dance" it's revealed that Roark Jr's first name was Ethan, which is also presumably the name of his father, Senator Roark. Wallenquist's first name is also mentioned to be Alarich by Ava.