More Details

Studio:Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd

Amazon.co.uk Review

Robert Rodriguez’s take on Frank Miller’s Sin City looked stunning on the big screen. Never has a comic book movie so faithful translated its visual look from page to film, and Rodriguez’s movie (with help from guest directors Miller himself and Quentin Tarantino) positively ate up the screen.

Furthermore, Sin City is the kind of film that could quite easily be tempered were it not translated correctly to disc format. But there was never any danger that it wouldn’t be. The Blu-ray presentation of Sin City is quite brilliant, richly translating the visuals to a smaller screen with a level of detail that’s nothing short of stunning.

The film itself is superb, too. It’s basically three stories meshed together, although the whole collection is firmly stolen by Mickey Rourke. Never mind The Wrestler; this, for our money, was where the Rourke comeback trail started, and Sin City is notably poorer whenever he’s out of view.

Matched with audio that delivers a broad and vibrant sound stage, Sin City is a very strong Bu-ray release, and an excellent demo too for the potential of high definition--Jon Foster

Amazon.co.uk Review

Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books. In the first of three separate but loosely related stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke in heavy makeup) tries to track down the killers of a woman who ended up dead in his bed. In the second story, Dwight's (Clive Owen) attempt to defend a woman from a brutal abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens to destroy the uneasy truce among the police, the mob, and the women of Old Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last day on the job (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a kidnapper, but is himself thrown in jail. Years later, he has a chance to save her again.

Based on three of Miller's immensely popular and immensely gritty books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard), Sin City is unquestionably the most faithful comic-book-based movie ever made. Each shot looks like a panel from its source material, and director Rodriguez (who refers to it as a "translation" rather than an adaptation) resigned from the Directors Guild so that Miller could share a directing credit. Like the books, it's almost entirely in stark black and white with some occasional bursts of color (a woman's red lips, a villain's yellow face). The backgrounds are entirely digitally generated, yet not self-consciously so, and perfectly capture Miller's gritty cityscape. And though most of Miller's copious nudity is absent, the violence is unrelentingly present. That may be the biggest obstacle to viewers who aren't already fans of the books and who may have been turned off by Kill Bill (whose director, Quentin Tarantino, helmed one scene of Sin City). In addition, it's a bleak, desperate world in which the heroes are killers, corruption rules, and the women are almost all prostitutes or strippers. But Miller's stories are riveting, and the huge cast--which also includes Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Michael Clarke Duncan, Devin Aoki, Carla Gugino, and Josh Hartnett--is just about perfect. (Only Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen, while very well-suited to their roles, seem hard to separate from their established screen personas.) In what Rodriguez hopes is the first of a series, Sin City is a spectacular achievement. --David Horiuchi, Amazon.com

Find out more on Amazon

Reviews