Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For / Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin / Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (, 102 m., 2014)

In 2005, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller teamed up to bring Miller’s bloody, violent, neo-noir-infused graphic novel Sin City to the big screen. Now, some nine years on, the duo has proffered a sequel. And so, here we find ourselves, mired again in the muck of Miller’s black-and-white (with occasional flashes of green, red, yellow and other vibrant colors) universe, where the femmes are fatale, the men smoke like chimneys, and virtually everything looks like it’s been lit through Venetian blinds.

Rodriguez wastes no time plunging us head-first into Miller’s rogue’s gallery of freaks, miscreants and anti-heroes. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (apt title) begins, once again, with Marv (Mickey Rourke, having the time of his life), a big, lumbering (yet surprisingly agile) specimen with the physique of an over-the-hill pro wrestler and the facial construction and hairstyle of a Dick Tracy villain. He spends night after night in a strip bar that owes something to the basic design of Rodriguez’s own Titty Twister from From Dusk Till Dawn, eyeing Nancy (Jessica Alba), a depressed stripper who is haunted by the vision of Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a detective who died protecting her in the first film from the hired thugs of the corrupt Senator Roark, played with lip-smacking sadism by Powers Boothe, mind bloodied by revenge-fueled rage, still mourning the loss of his deviant son the Yellow Bastard in the first film (he opines, hilariously enough, at one point that his son “could’ve become President” as he stares at a painting of his full-on mustard-colored offspring on the office wall).

Jarringly, we are then yanked across town to meet Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a gambler who picks up a hooker (Julia Garner) and drags her with him to the very strip club Nancy works in to play Roark in a high-stakes poker game. Johnny’s focus and determination to beat Roark at his own game comes with a price, however. Then there’s Dwight (played in the original film by Clive Owen, here given a face lift – to say nothing of vocal alteration – by Josh Brolin). He’s a private detective who gathers information on cheating husbands such as Joey (Ray Liotta), who is carrying on a fling with Sally (Juno Temple) much to the eager delight of Dwight’s peeping camera. Dwight, sad to say, runs afoul of a gloriously classic noir villain called Ava Lord (Eva Green, spitting acid with great relish). Between the detective she has seduced (Christopher Meloni), her vaguely racist stereotyped black man-servant Manute (Dennis Haysbert) and various criminal underworld types at her disposal (including an unrecognizable – disfigured – Stacy Keach), Ms. Lord seems to have the drop on poor old Dwight. Throw in Gail (Rosario Dawson), Miho (Jamie Chung) and Goldie/Wendy (Jaime King) as the toughest hooker/biker gang in town and the cards are, arguably, not in Dwight’s favor.

As was the case with the first film, this is all handled with seeming insouciance by Miller and Rodriguez, who go from one vignette to another, only occasionally allowing the threads to dovetail, with Marv and Nancy and the like casually passing through from one story to another. To call out the film as being on stylistic overload might be the understatement of the millennium – this is, after all, a true graphic novel come to life. Rodriguez uses his fast-and-furious, rough-and-tumble DIY techniques and throws everything including the kitchen sink at the wall to see what sticks, and Miller aids and abets beyond the simple screenplay/executive producer credits.

The cast is all in as well, with the leads and even the high-energy cameos by the likes of Christopher Lloyd (as a smack-shooting unlicensed back-alley doctor) and Lady GaGa herself (as a waitress called Bertha) enlivening the proceedings. The performances approach the level of kabuki theater, with everyone going over the top, doubling back, and making the flight all over again throughout. One, ahem, asset that this film has over the first one is the lovely Eva Green as Ava. Her performance is part witch, part vampire, part Barbara Stanwyck. Every gesture, line reading, costume and scheme on her part seems lifted from the very pages of film noir history. Perhaps showing that they haven’t completely lost their sense of humor, Rodriguez and Miller (in a meta moment that might make Tarantino proud) show Alba’s despondent stripper watching some old noir film on a black-and-white TV as if to learn how to go on living.

And yet…we’ve been here before. The freshness of the first film came from seeing neo-noir done in an exciting, visceral, deeply engrossing cinematic experience as never before. To call this sequel, enjoyable though it may be, a nihilistic exercise in human depravity on a near-mythic scale is fitting, to say the least. However, nihilism (belief in nothing) suggests a philosophy that is nearly completely lacking from Miller’s universe. Things just are this way, with no rhyme, and no reason. To those who didn’t appreciate the first film, I cannot convince you. To those who like their popcorn bloody, their guns smoking and their ladies deadly, I suggest this for a pleasant, artfully-crafted diversion in the filmography of Mr. Rodriguez – indeed, a pleasant sojourn from the increasingly painful family films his dual personality seems to bi-annually crank out. Enjoy?