Sin City: A Dame to Kill For review

                2005’s “Sin City” was a visually ambitious effort by troublemaker director Robert Rodriguez, adapting the black and white Frank Miller comic book as accurately as possible. In employing never before seen green-screen technology, animating almost everything except the actors, he envisioned a graphically unique movie universe that romanticized and exaggerated the film noir style, digitally sculpting entire sets and moods with angular lighting concepts and isolating certain characters and props with splashes of sharply contrasting color. Sure, it was gimmicky and the style vastly outweighed the substance, but, it in a midnight-movie way, it was purely cinematic and it suggested whole new possibilities between the worlds of digital animation and adult-themed action movies.

                Then again, what we took for granted in Rodriguez’s successful experiment was the apparent tight-wire act it accomplished with tone and execution. Lesser adopters of this technique, like Zach Snyder’s “300,” “Watchmen,” and “Sucker Punch,” proved that world building and visual panache must to be balanced with sensitive direction, considerate acting , and, at the very least, functional storytelling to pull a film together, lest the entire thing becomes an overblown videogame cut-scene. While the original “Sin City” was light on story, it was effectively moody, paced exceptionally well and doled things out in such a way that it continually surprised the audience. Now, nine years later, Rodriguez’s long-planned sequel “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” performs like an over-confident cover-band, lazily going through the motions, believing that it doesn’t matter if it slogs through the song as long it nails the guitar solo.

                Like its 2005 predecessor, this is a triptych narrative that interweaves three short stories, all staring different protagonists. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Johnny, an egotistical gambler who gets in over his head when he wins a game of poker against the cartoonishly evil Senator Roark—played with some conviction by Booth Powers. The second plot, in which the film takes its name, tells the backstory of private eye Dwight McCarthy (previously played by Clive Owen , now Josh Brolin) who gets tangled in the web of a spider-women named Ava (Eva Green), and who vows revenge after a brutal double-cross leaves him disfigured. The last tale tracks the mental deterioration of a stripper named Nancy (Jessica Alba), who seeks to kill the Senator responsible for death of her fatherly protector Hartigan, played in both films by Bruce Willis.

                In this triple-scoop serving of splat-tastic pulp there’s no shortage of stars hamming it up as they deliver the Miller’s tough-guy dialogue, as well as no shortage of ultra-violent black and white money-shots. However, for all its hack and slash and stylish masculine bravado, what the movie does lack is any tangible sense of mood, danger, or dramatic tension.  

                 The Joseph Gordon Levitt short is inexplicably split apart, and though the first half builds to an interesting conflict, when we pick back up 25 minutes later the story putters out in a flatulent anti-climax.  Alba was always distractingly miscast as Nancy Callahan but now that she’s expected to do more than just provide cheesecake as a damsel in distress, her failings as a dramatic actress are even more apparent in this totally unnecessary follow-up  to the last movie’s most emotionally resonant segment.  Here she broods at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, talks to Obi-Wan Bruce Willis from beyond the grave and comically takes to the streets on a motor-cycle.  The title story, based on a vintage Sin City text, narratively anchors the rest of flab around it, highlighting the movie’s best performance in Eva Green vamping it up as the archetypal femme fatale. But even with this Rodriguez manages to spoil the experience by over playing his digital color-correction tricks and over-exploiting the 3D exploitation.             

                Unfortunately, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is a depressing disappointment, not only for the audience who may still remember the energy and audaciousness of the first film and have been anticipating this sequel for many summers, but for the talented cast and creators responsible for its deflating results.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014