The Triangle

Issue date: 4/8/05 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: yahoo movies

I no longer feel obligated to live a good and righteous life, for no torture in hell could possibly be as painful as sitting through the movie Sin City.

I don't even know where to begin. I could start with the plot, I suppose, or the fact that the movie is an unending showcase of crotch horror, or perhaps I could begin by mentioning that this is not so much a movie as it is the masturbatory fantasies of adolescents with a proclivity to massacre their fellow students at school.

I suppose I'll start with the plot. At the end of the film, that is to say, sixty-three hours after I entered the theatre, a man in front of me leaned back in his chair, looked gravely at the screen, put his hand to his chin as though deep in thought and, after a moment, loudly demanded "What?" I think he summed it up well. The story is erratic and inconsistent, a terrible mish-mash of plot holes wide enough to drive a hundred garbage trucks through side by side. The opening scene of the film involves Josh Hartnett as a hit man (in and of itself a colossal blunder) murdering a beautiful woman in a red dress. One would think that this, the opening scene, would have something to do with the plot of the film. Not so! After beating the fact that this is not Sin City, but Frank Miller's Sin City, into our skulls, the story hops to an entirely different and unrelated scene. Perhaps you're the sort of person that enjoys this schizophrenic epilepsy. I am not.

An entire third of the film revolves around a beefy thug killing everyone even remotely related to the murder of a whore he was sleeping with. This goes all the way up the power scale of the city until he murders Cardinal Rourke, a gay cannibal priest that lives in a castle. Perhaps I was dozing when they explained this portion of the movie, but Cardinal Rourke seems to have ordered the whores' death for no reason whatsoever. He explains that while he and a friend (I'll get to him later) were murdering and then eating whores, this particular whore stayed in public places so they couldn't get to her. Therefore, they killed her and framed the beefy thug. Yeah, I was lost too.

This is just an example. The entire plot is like this. Bruce Willis is put in solitary confinement for eight years for a crime he didn't commit and never goes insane. Not even a little. He stays in good shape too and Senator Elvis, for some reason, is kind enough to give him a much-needed heart transplant. After getting out of jail, he tracks down a girl everyone is looking for by breaking into her home and finding a matchbook featuring a bar's logo on the cover. Apparently, Senator Elvis' forces could not themselves do this. Ugh. Terrible. Oh, and also, attention Quentin Tarantino: we understand that you like non-linear plots. Enough with it already. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and this is one of those occasions where garbling the plot with your out-of-order style tacked on like an afterthought is irritating and unbearable.

Media Credit: Yahoo movies Concept art, filming, and final product of Hartigan´s solitary confinement scene.

Enough about the plot. Perhaps you heard me mention that this film is one unending stream of crotch horrors? It is. If you see this film you get to see people stabbed, punched, shot, hit with a hatchet, so on and so forth, in the groin. Bruce Willis actually tears the genitals off a yellow light-bulb headed space-elf with his bare hands. Unrelated note: if Bruce Willis shoots you in the groin, 8 years of penis-regenerating therapies will turn you into a stinky yellow space elf with a head shaped like a light-bulb. The space-elf notes that "there were some side effects" to his treatments; aye, there are some side effects to this film in general, which may include loss of sexual appetite, dizziness, and vomiting. This film is kind enough to treat you to no fewer than a dozen crotch-related deaths. Even the fourth graders who snuck in to see this film with their 17-year old uncle said "that's a bit excessive."

This film made me uncomfortable for other reasons. Every single woman in it appears naked or dressed in the vinyl-and-fishnets uniform of a street whore. Even when a character goes to see his parole officer, she's completely naked, except for a thong. While I must admit I would murder for a chance to sniff that parole officer's socks, it makes me a bit uncomfortable to watch a movie made by a bunch of men that revolves around women dressed like tramps and toting machine guns. Remember those old magazines that had bikini-clad women with assault rifles on the front, and they were always titled something like Boobs 'n' Bullets? That's every woman in this film. It's as though a complete stranger came up to me on the street and began divulging the exact nature of their most heinous shower-time fantasies. (PS- I know what a TEC-9 looks like, so if you put a bunch of crap on the barrel to make it look like a gigantic bullet-spewing phallus, I will notice.)

Which leads me to my next point. Women, you may not want to see this movie. Every single woman in the movie is either a half-dressed whore or an incompetent slut requiring salvation from a strong, superior male. I'm no feminist, but even I was made uncomfortable by the tone of this film. It should be subtitled Sin City: Women Are Incompetent Bitches or Objects for Superior, Virile Men to Own and Abuse at Their Whimsy. Between the constant degradation and objectification of women and the pubescent bikini-and-assault-rifle fantasies, the audience couldn't help, nor be blamed for, squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

But surely, you say, there must be some redeeming qualities to this film? The only thing that I can think of is that it was shot in an interesting style. It looks good, like a comic book come to life. On the other hand, they decided to use watery fluorescent paint for the blood, so every time a character is shot, stabbed, or mutliated (and that is quite often) it looks like something put together by a high school student in an understaffed AV studio. No matter how good this film looks, the novelty of it wears off quickly and one begins to hunger for a plot, a hunger which is never satisfied.

Some will sing the praises of this film for it's Cinema Noir feel, it's old detective flick ambiance. Perhaps I have a short attention span, but this wears off with amazing speed. It's as though they are arguing that this film "has a good personality." It's been a while since I've been on a blind date, but I recall from various sitcoms that this argument should be a signal to run, not walk, in the opposite direction.

While there are numerous beautiful women in this film for the teenage audience to ogle and dream of abusing, there's only one likable character. He's a completely silent mute, gay lover to the cannibal priest, that hunts down and the tortures women, making them watch as he eats their flesh one chunk at a time. In the entire film, he seems to be the only one with a sense of humor, and he has no lines.

This made me feel a strange empathy with the character, as though he was taking pity on me by not forcing me to listen to contrived, force dialogue and pseudo-witty one-liners. For that, I thank him. Thank you, insane silent gay man-whore cannibal serial killer.

So there you have it. This film has absolutely nothing going for it. Much like a sorority pledge at a $1 house drinks night, it looks good, but is incredibly, unbelievably, and unforgivably stupid. Words fail me; I cannot think of a strong enough way, conveying enough disgust and disappointment, to say that Sin City is crap.

Rating: 1 triangle

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