Because I reviewed the sequel…

Robert Rodriguez, try as he might, will probably never be a great director, but he is at least a director capable of great passion and investment in messy products when he gets around to it. His greatest films (and admittedly, his worst, but that is what happens when we are in the company of a very personal director) are generally those which see him in full control, although Sin City is something of an exception. It is perhaps his best film, but saying that Sin City is one of Robert Rodriguez’s best films doesn’t exactly address the extent to which it is a Robert Rodriguez film. Certainly, it is probably the furthest from his traditional wheelhouse of any film he has yet made, largely because it is a trade-off of his own alternately candy-coated and drained-out latin-tinged aesthetic for the hard-edged noir of Frank Miller’s sort. Beyond this, while Miller’s garish chiaroscuro could only come from the heyday of the amoral 1940s or the dark and dreary 1980s (bleeding over into the early ’90s, when the Sin City graphic novels began in earnest), Rodriguez knows only the exploitation films of the 1970s and pop-and-fizzle children’s movies of the atomic ’50s and bubblegum ’60s. Add in the fact that Rodriguez, whether hyper-saturating them to the point of bursting in Spy Kids or muting to a tactile sweat in Desperado, is a director of color, and Sin City is defined primarily by the absence of color, and what you’ve got is a genuine experiment. But how close this film in particular apes Miller’s style – we’re talking lengthy recreations of shot-by-shot panels and direct copies from the books – begs the question of whether it really is Rodrigeuz’s in the first place.
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