![]() ![]() Indeed, the Sin City rulebook of no-color is all but dropped for her emerald stares, blue trench coat, and blood-red lipstick. Believably starring Eva Green as that nominal dame, she plays the categorical femme fatale with her husky American accent, infinite supply of lit cigarettes in hand, and piercing green eyes. The real showstopper, however, is the one major narrative thread extracted from a Miller graphic novel, “A Dame to Kill For,” and is featured uninterrupted in the center of the movie’s 100-minute running time. Mitchum Goes to Washington, these wraparound plots become minacious fun. Both stories feel abbreviated and somewhat sloppy, but any time a smoke filled saloon is ventilated by Gordon-Levitt trading sinister words with Boothe, playing Senator Roarke like he’s Mr. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) from the last movie. These include Joseph Gordon-Levitt coming the closest to capturing the appeal of a genuine noir hero named Johnny, a cocksure gambler who is on a hot-streak when he decides to play cards with the most powerful man in Sin City (Powers Boothe), and a returning Jessica Alba as Nancy, the stripper who once had a heart of gold but now feels only arsenic running through her veins after the death of her deified Det. However, other than a brief (and misplaced) prologue starring a resuscitated Mickey Rourke as Marv on a dizzying rampage of comic book carnage, most of the film’s plots were written by Frank Miller exclusively for the big screen. Like the first film, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is an anthology of several overlapping, nonlinear storylines. Thus your level of enjoyment will be directly proportional to your ability to take the banal beatings in order to get to the lurid payoffs of bullets, booze, and broads. While punctuated with intermittent splatters of brilliance and fun, mostly from its titular (very titular) title, the sequel is simultaneously marred by the limp self-parody that has become present in all of director Robert Rodriguez’s work in the intervening decade. Sadly, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For isn’t quite that. In short, Sin City played as if Frank Miller found crumpled pages on Mickey Spillane’s bedroom floor, jettisoned for being too absurd, and then he added ninja throwing stars to them. It sure ain’t the noir of Dashiell Hammett or Billy Wilder, but it could have easily worked as a cheapie from poverty row that had been liberated from the constraints of 1940s censorship and good taste. Whereas 300 was like being trapped in an airless video game cinematic while gasping for oxygen, the earlier Sin City was stylish enough in its pulp noir to pass off as pseudo-artsy and wholly-entertaining B-level sleaze. He's pointing out the sights and bellowing damnation in your ear.The first Sin City deserves credit for the “visionary” and medium-bending comic book visuals that are often attributed to Zack Snyder. The effect is akin to being led around a red-light district by a conflicted Pentecostal preacher. Time and again, Rodriguez and Miller invite us to ogle her and then detest her, ogle her and then repent. I'm tempted to view Green's character as the perfect embodiment of the directors' cock-eyed sexual politics, in that she is a beautiful witch, at once arousing and deadly. The film is also played with the requisite gusto by Josh Brolin as a hapless private eye and Eva Green as his raven-haired femme fatale. Rodriguez and Miller trade in disreputable teenage kicks and they lay the style on with a trowel. This is not to say there is not some fun to be had amid the overheated twists and turns. This sequel offers a congested spaghetti junction of interlocking stories, all of which are leading no place in particular. But the thrill has gone or at the very least dwindled. It boasts the same lush comic-book visuals, the same rasping gumshoe narration and many of the old familiar locals (Mickey Rourke's beat-up pug Jessica Alba's gun-toting pole dancer). On the face of it, the landscape appears identical to Rodriguez and Miller's original 2005 picture. Hang a left out of Sin City and you eventually arrive at Sin City 2, a deodorised postcode specialising in stage-managed danger. ![]()
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