This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for June 2025

Talk about over the top… I am not familiar with Frank Miller’s work, except for the fact that it seems the early 2000’s were obsessed with it. There’s a plethora of movies from this era based on his comics (some of which could later be featured in this series). Visually, the movie is appealing. This mostly-black-and-white-except-when-something-needs-to-stand-out style, somewhat reminiscent of what Steven Spielberg did in Schidler’s List, was the main reason I decided to watch this movie. The film also makes use of high-contrast shots in a perpetually dark setting, the success of which is mixed. Inspired by its source, at best it looks like something out of the MadWorld video game, and at worst it resembles the Bad Apple video. There are also some scenes that remind me of the cinematic style of Baz Luhrmann: highly melodramatic shots aided by the use of CGI that do not aim so much at imitating reality as they do at building upon the fictional condition of things, as if saying, “hey boy, this isn’t supposed to look real, it is supposed to feel grandiose”. At that, I think it mostly succeeds.

The movie has three directors, one of which is Frank Miller himself. The other two is the dynamic duo of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Rodriguez also scores the film, which would explain the uncanny resemblance that the main theme has to the Grindhouse one. It suits both of them’s (Rodriguez and Tarantino) style: abundant violence and genre-stereotypes which are sometimes sincere and sometimes ironic, and which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. The cast is stellar: Bruce Willis, Benicio del Toro, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Michael Clarke Duncan. You name it, it doesn’t get any better than this.

There’s a lot of nudity in this film, and by that I mean female nudity. The old combo of making a movie R-rated through violence and male-gaze is strong on this one. The question that arises from is what the movie makes out of them. Is it gratuitous? Some of them undoubtedly. You might argue that the prostitutes’ outfits are somewhat relevant to the story, so I let them slide. Carla Gugino’s didn’t have to be naked most of the time, not that I am complaining. Jessica Alba’s character is perhaps the most problematic, in the sense that, while not as revealing as Gugino’s, she is made completely dependant on Bruce Willis’ character. A relationship whose age difference might strike as odd, but hey, it worked on Friends so why the hell not?

The movie is cheesy, no doubt about it. The question is what kind of cheesiness are we dealing here with? Is it an artistic cheesiness like that of Obayashi’s House, in which you could forgive it given how beautiful it made the film look? Is it a slasher film cheesiness, in which you predispose yourself to experience something ridiculous for the heck of it? Or is it plain bad? I wouldn’t say the movie is bad. It is entertaining if anything, and I think that one should watch it with that approach in mind, not hoping to see a masterpiece of what movies based on dark comics could be, as The Dark Knight or Joker (both movies, let’s not forget, about a murderer clown), but rather as an over the top example of action cinema, which can be enjoyable by itself. As such, I think it can safely occupy the same space on a shelf as Kill Bill or maybe even The Substance, as something that can be assimilated as an experience of what can be achieved by pushing suspension of disbelief to its limits.