Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - Review

DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
WRITTEN BY: Frank Miller
STARRING: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joesph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liota, Jamie King, Christopher Lloyd, Jamie Chung, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Meloni, Juno Temple

*SPOILERS AHOY!*

I don't know what it is exactly, but there's something I find kind of endearing about Frank Miller and his...Frank Millerness. Who really knows what caused him to topple off the deep end like he did. I think some people think it was 9/11, though I'm partial to the idea that maybe it was something that was there all along and just manifested itself recently. Whatever the case may be, Frank Miller has become this sort of poster child for that time around the 90's where pretty much everything in comics had to be dark, gritty, and bursting at the seams with musclebound machismo. It's something I think a lot of comics fans are content to forget, or at least put firmly behind them. Frank Miller, on the other hand, represents the remaining vestiges of that dark age of comics still grasping for a serious audience. His comics seem to be stuck in this endless loop of repeating themselves to the point where I honestly can't tell if his work is meant to be taken seriously or as satire.

For all the crap I give Frank Miller, though, I did genuinely enjoy the first Sin City. Not for the story, mind you, mostly because of its unique style and sense of atmosphere that came from shooting it almost entirely on green screen and making it black and white in post. Because of this, it really did feel like the first time a comic was brought literally straight from the page and to the screen and then put into motion, and co-director Robert Rodriguez has said that this was his intention from the very beginning. A Dame to Kill For looks just about the same as the first one, with seemingly little improvement on the technology even ten years later. It might not be using its color splashes as sparingly or effectively as before, but for the most part we get more of Miller's iconic high contrast visuals. It doesn't look bad, mind you, and it does look really good from time to time, but it does feel like more of the same, and in more ways than just the visuals.

Though there isn't a bookend story like the first one, we do get a brief opening that introduces us (or rather re-introduces us) to everyone's favorite square-jawed, scar-riddled psychopath Marv, played by Mickey Rourke in all his musclebound glory. Again, like the first one, the meat of the narrative is made up of three separate but vaguely connected stories that take us into the seedy underbelly of Basin City. The first of these stories focuses on Dwight (here noticeably NOT played by Clive Owen) as he gets embroiled in a power play scheme centered on an estranged but seductive former lover. The second story has a cocky gambler (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) getting in trouble with the wrong people on the wrong night, all the while harboring a dark secret that makes him a target to someone very powerful. The final story centers on Nancy, four years after the end of story in the first film, still mourning for John Hartigan (appearing briefly as a ghost so Bruce Willis can collect his check) and struggling with her desires for bloody satisfaction against the man responsible for his death.

While watching the movie I just kind of went with this setup and didn't think much of it, but after leaving the theater and thinking about it for a while I got confused as to how exactly the timeline here is supposed to work. From what I understand, most of this is actually a prequel to the events of the first film, seeing as Marv is, you know, still alive. Problem is one of the sequences takes place nearly four years after the events of one of the first film's stories, and Marv plays a prominent role in it. If that's true, does that mean that the stories of the first movie take place years apart? Two of the stories here are made entirely for the film and aren't based on any of the existing Sin City comics, so we can't really use the framework of those to judge how time works here. Bah, who cares!? Any excuse to have Rourke chew the scenery a bit more, even if his presence in most of the stories is completely shoehorned, is fine for me as long as it gets us away from the less interesting characters.

In a way that's kind of endemic of another problem the film has. A lot of attention paid to what are probably Miller and Rodriguez's favorite characters (i.e. Marv and Nancy) and not enough to the new or supporting ones. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, especially, gets the shaft in this regard. While his introduction is interesting and gets us invested in his story, the rest of his time on screen is repetitious and ends with an unsatisfying whimper that leaves the audience wanting more, and not in the good way, either. We have cameos from famous actors all over the place, but they're really not given all that much room to shine. With the first film it really did feel like an ensemble cast, and while you may have found one character more interesting than the others, attention was divided up fairly evenly as far as their overall importance. Here its just all so disjointed and unfocused, like Miller and Rodriguez just had a bunch of really cool ideas and just slapped them together into a vague story-shaped package.

However much I wish anthology movies were more of a "thing", watching this its easy to see how building your movie around separated stories can royally screw with your film's structure. Say what you will about the original, but at least that had a measure of cohesiveness and uniformity in its quality. Each story not only told its own story, but each one in turn gave us a broader, singular look at the world in which it took place. With Dame to Kill For, we spend most of the stories revisiting characters and locations we saw in the first one. Motivations fall squarely in the categories of either revenge or sex (or revenge and sex). Lots of people die in stylish ways, A character shoots a character and...that's it, roll credits. The ending is so abrupt and jarring that it left me feeling hollow and unfulfilled, like there was more to it but they decided to cut it out at the last minute. It's not like I'm looking for a deep, meaningful conclusion or whatever, but really, would a bit of a denouement be too much to ask for? The most fulfilling of the three stories is the title one, and while that one actually does have an ending, it also ends about halfway in and has little bearing on the rest of the stories after the fact.

If anything what probably kills this movie more than its weak story and flat characters is that, like Miller himself, it feels like a creature of its era, temporally out of place, appealing chiefly to teenage boys who like sneaking into R rated movies to see Eva Green strut around naked. Maybe if this movie came out five or six years ago there would have still been an audience for it, but audience tastes have changed over the past ten years. Good on Rodriguez for pursuing his passion projects, but again, like Miller, his inability to branch out from his usual schtick is causing his work to become stale, almost to the point of self parody. Its not like there's nothing to enjoy here if you're the right audience for it, there were flashes here and there of enjoyable madness here and there that kept my interest. For the most part, though, the good stuff in this movie just made me want to go back and watch the original instead. With how meager its box office is, I doubt we can expect any more stories of grit and noir from the world of Basin City, though that may be for the best. Better to leave the good memories of the original intact than drive them further into the ground. Some franchises still haven't gotten that message yet.