Mickey Rourke: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked‏

2. Marv - Sin City (2005)

A broken, washed up and unloved man with a profoundly unloveable face and anger issues - what comeback role could be better suited to Mickey Rourke than Sin City, star of one of the various noir-drenched vignettes that makes up Sin City? Robert Rodriguez's green screen-heavy adaptation of Frank Miller's infamous comic book series isn't light on the star power, with the ensemble also featuring the likes of Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Benicio del Toro, Clive Owen and Elijah Wood. It's Rourke's character that has become synonymous with the film, however, and his combination of prosthetics and a genuinely messed-up visage that allows his turn as Marv to be the closest to how he appears in the comics. If Sin City has one failing it's that it's a little too slavish to its source material at times. Rodriguez does a truly commendable job at bringing Miller's stylised artwork to life, but at times it can seem a little too much like a technical exercise and not enough like a good movie. Where some of the talented actors in the cast are reduced to two-dimensional characters reciting lines from the page, Rourke manages to imbue the fairly rote Marv character with some genuine pathos. We don't like to keep harping on about it, but we reckon there's a fair amount of autobiography and life experience being poured into his turn as a street tough, a noir version of Lennie from Of Mice And Men whom Miller described as "Conan in a trench coat". Rather than just letting him exist as a bundle of genre tropes, however, Rourke actually manages to make us care about the big dumb lug. He also manages to handle the numerous more, ahem, physical sequences pretty well too. Not bad for a man in his sixties.