Frank Miller treats the screen as a comic-book page, with forceful results in Sin City, co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. We rate the visual invention, but his taste for punishment and hard-boiled speech can make an evening feel long.
Fi1m perspective
In Sin City (2005), people and streets look drawn, with hard black-and-white contrasts that make a familiar criminal underworld worth looking at afresh. Frank Miller and co-director Robert Rodriguez hold the film unusually close to Miller's comics, and we recommend it to viewers with an appetite for violent noir. Green-screen work, digital backdrops and selective colour help reproduce the compositions of the panels. There is real care in these images, even when the people inside them have little room to surprise us.
Miller had written the screenplays for RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993) before taking up directing. With Sin City, adapting his own work gave him pictures worth preserving, but also dialogue that needed more freedom from the page. Too often, a line insists on a character's toughness after the image has made the point. The music is more useful. The score by Robert Rodriguez, Graeme Revell and John Debney takes the grubby dramas seriously, giving them weight without pretending that any of this is ordinary life.
The three linked stories put guilt and revenge to work, but their characters tend to arrive with their moral positions already fixed. That suits the pulp approach until the repeated punishments begin to feel like all the film has to offer. We were worn down by the brutality in Sin City, because each new cruelty did so little to change our understanding of the people involved. Revenge rarely becomes troubling in any more complicated way. There is enough visual invention to sustain the evening, but 124 minutes is a long time to spend with so little doubt about anyone.
The solo turn came with The Spirit (2008), an adaptation of Will Eisner's comic that exposed weaknesses in pacing and the handling of actors. Miller reunited with Rodriguez for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014), continuing the earlier film's visual and narrative approach. Start with the first Sin City, for Mickey Rourke and the hard images, and be prepared to tire of its company before it tires of hurting people.
Biography
Frank Miller is an American comic book writer, artist and film director. He was born on 27 January 1957 in Olney, Maryland.
Miller is known for his comic book work including runs on Daredevil and graphic novels such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One and Sin City. He created the character Elektra. His graphic novel 300 was published in 1998.
Miller wrote the screenplays for RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993). He co-directed Sin City (2005) with Robert Rodriguez and the sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). He also directed The Spirit (2008).
