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Critics claim that Sin City is sexist, portraying all women as victims, whores or victimized whores. Sin City's noir-extreme vixens hold much of the power in Basin City, from the girl-grew-up-strong Nancy to the amazons who run the red light district of Old Town. The female characters criticised as portraying sexism are anything but; twists on noir stereotypes as strong, violent and empowered as the males heroes.
Fire and ice. Twin sisters. Identical. One's a dream come true. The perfect fantasy come to life. The perfect lover. The other? Dream's over, pal. She's a tough-as-nails Old Town enforcer. She'll pistol whip you or blast a bullet into your gut just the same as look at you.
When Goldie found out about what was going on out at the Roark farm, she knew her time was running out. She went looking for the biggest, meanest lug she could find to protect her, and found Marv. He couldn't save her, but he was sure as hell going to make whoever hurt her pay.
Though the film's most indelible image of Goldie is her lying naked on a heart-shaped bed, that's not what we got for this figure. Instead, she's standing tall, with a fairly relaxed pose. Kind of dull, really, but you're not buying Goldie for her high-octane action scenes: Goldie's just a memory, the fire burning in Marv that keeps him moving forward. So the pose would be fine, if she could stand up.
If you view the figure in profile, you'll see that Goldie's center of gravity comes down right in front of her toes, which means that there's no way she'll stand on her own. The figure includes a clear plastic base, which puts her one up on Miho, at least, but still doesn't keep her vertical. You'll either have to spend some time boiling her legs and reshaping them or have her leaning against Marv's back - yeah, that's a nice image, but the basic fact of the matter is that if you make an action figure that can't stand under its own power, you've failed.
The sculpt on the jacket and Goldie/Wendy's crinkly unitard thing
is good, of course, though the skintight clothes make her look overly skinny. Of course, maybe that's accurate, since Jamie King is a recovering heroin addict. The face does a great job of capturing her look from this movie - King is one of those people who can look anywhere between 20 and 40 depending on how she's made up, and for Sin City she was pushing toward the upper end of that scale.
Goldie's only real accessory is a snub-nose pistol she can hold in her right hand. The figure has replacement bare arms so you can remove her long red coat - just pop them out at the shoulder, slip the coat out from under her hair and put the new arms in place.
The gun is nice, but the way the figure is articulated renders it nearly useless. Goldie has no ankles, no knees, no hips, no waist... just wrists, shoulders and neck. The shoulders don't really serve much purpose beyond swapping the arms, since they're designed not as circles, but as long ovals; turn them even slightly, and the result is awful. So really, she's just got a neck and wrists.
Paint is decent, but not great. The body of her coat isn't
the same color as the arms, and neither of them match her shoes. Her hair has the appropriate shadows and highlights, and it actually manages to look like hair - a new accomplishment for NECA.
Unlike the most of the figures in the line, Goldie doesn't have a black and white variant - while there is a b/w version of this figure, it's not Goldie, but her twin sister Wendy. You want both characters, you buy the figure twice. Right now, it may not seem like there's much point to buying both, but the twins have a bigger role in some of the other Sin City stories, so once those are made into films, you might wish you grabbed a pair when you had the chance.
The female leads of each of Sin City's three main stories have each been in two comicbook movies, an odd coincidence. Of course, as more comic movies are made, that won't be such a rarity.
-- 09/15/05
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