Frank Miller’s crime stories give filmmakers forceful images and stubbornly simple people. We recommend Sin City for its commitment to the drawings, though the hard-boiled speeches and repeated punishments test our patience.
Fi1m perspective
In Sin City (2005), people arrive with their moral positions largely settled, and revenge supplies much of what follows. Frank Miller and co-director Robert Rodriguez make those people and their surroundings resemble drawings with unusual conviction. It is a good film for viewers who like violent noir, though its fidelity to Miller’s comics preserves their weaknesses as carefully as their hard black-and-white images. The writing leaves too little room for doubt about anyone.
The route to that film runs through comics made increasingly on Miller’s own terms. After Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One (1987), the latter with David Mazzucchelli, he moved into creator-owned work with Sin City (from 1991) and 300 (1998). His screenwriting credits on RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993) came before he co-directed Sin City. Working with Rodriguez gave him a way to keep the source drawings unusually close to the finished film.
That closeness pays off more reliably in the images than in the dialogue. Miller and Rodriguez push hard-boiled speech into self-conscious display, underlining violence that scarcely needs explaining. Some of the excess is enjoyable, and the score by Rodriguez, Graeme Revell and John Debney gives these grubby stories weight without pretending they are ordinary life. We grew weary of the repeated cruelty because the characters’ fixed moral positions left so little to reconsider.
300 (2007), directed by Zack Snyder from Miller’s graphic novel, makes the danger of relying on those images plain. Its fighting is carefully arranged, but the narrow emotional life and repeated slow motion become exhausting. We would not recommend it on visual discipline alone. Those are faults in the adaptation, and we would not charge all of them to the writer of the source.
Miller went on to direct The Spirit (2008) alone and to co-direct the Sin City sequel (2014) with Rodriguez. The first Sin City is the film we recommend to understand what his work can offer the screen. Allow for dialogue that insists on explaining how tough everyone is.
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).
