SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR
Director : Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez
Cast : Jessica Alba, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, Eva Green, Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson, Juno Temple, Jaime King, Bruce Willis, Jamie Chung, Lady Gaga, Christopher Meloni, Jeremy Piven
Genre : Action/Thriller
Opens : 8 August 2014
Rating : R21 (Violence, Nudity & Sexual Scenes)
Running time: 102 mins
Basin CITY. A cesspool dripping with BLOOD
and ALCOHOL
and SEX
and GRIME.
A grimy CESSPOOL. NINE years after the FIRST
movie, we RETURN. FOUR interlocking stories. “Just ANOTHER
Saturday NIGHT” – Marv (Rourke) BEATS up PUNKS and hangs off the
side of POLICE CARS. “The Long BAD Night” – Johnny (Gordon-Levitt),
a self-assured young gambler, beats Senator Roark (Boothe) in a GAME
of POKER.
Big MISTAKE.
“A DAME
to Kill For” – Ava Lord (Green), sly WICKEDNESS taken the form of a WOMAN.
She CASTS
her SPELL
upon former flame Dwight (Brolin) once more. Can he ESCAPE this enchantress’ GRASP?
“Nancy’s Last DANCE” – stripper Nancy (Alba) is victim no MORE.
She seeks to AVENGE the death of Hartigan (Willis), her PROTECTOR. AVENGING
his DEATH.
Her crosshairs are SET on Roark. 
This
reviewer had planned to write the whole thing in the style of Frank Miller but
gave up after that paragraph. The first Sin
City film broke its share of ground by hewing closely to the stylisation
Miller had drawn into his graphic novels, using visual effects and
cinematography to replicate the striking aesthetic of the Sin City books. Black and white with occasional violent bursts of
selective colour, often lapsing into animated silhouettes. Miller was initially
reluctant to allow an adaptation to be filmed, but Robert Rodriguez won him
over and they became co-directors on both movies. It’s nine years later and
it’s not quite so novel anymore. In-between then and now we’ve had the likes of
300 and the dismal The Spirit, the latter directed by
Miller himself. It’s still a great gimmick and we bet this movie is stunning in
3D (we saw the 2D version). However, any gimmick can only carry a film so far.
The
movie is clearly striving for a noir feel but so much of the Frank Miller
dialogue, in reaching for a hard-boiled attitude, comes off as laughably silly.
“It’s another hot night. The kind of night that makes people do sweaty, secret
things,” Dwight says in voiceover. When he gets kicked in the crotch, he
describes it as “an atom bomb go(ing) off between my legs.” The intensity of all
the brutal, wince-inducing violence in the film ends up being undercut by the
writing. “A Dame to Kill For” has as its central character an evil,
manipulative, often-naked seductress. Eva Green vamps it up entertainingly as
is her speciality, but there’s not much more to Ava Lord than that – she’s a
textbook femme fatale. The character’s speech about the nature of insanity and
evil from the graphic novel, which would have added a layer or two, is cut. “Nancy’s
Last Dance”, an original story written for this film, also undoes everything
the character went through in the first film. Nancy, that narrow beam of light
that was able to escape the darkness of Sin City, is now just another avenging
angel. “The Long Bad Night”, the other original story, is carried by
Gordon-Levitt playing against Boothe but is never wholly compelling.
The
film’s ensemble cast gets to play it up in ways few other movies would let
them, to mostly entertaining results. Josh Brolin, playing Dwight before the
character had plastic surgery to look like Clive Owen, is convincingly tough
and grizzled. Powers Boothe is a hoot as a “love to hate” villain of the most
extreme variety. Gordon-Levitt sinks his teeth into playing Johnny in his
transition from cocksure and feeling untouchable to wounded and seething. The
afore-mentioned Green, taking the role long-linked to Angelina Jolie, does look
like she’s having a ball and seems extremely comfortable with the
nigh-gratuitous nudity. Speaking of showing skin, Jessica Alba famously has a
no-nudity clause but given Nancy’s get-ups in this film, she might as well be
naked. Her attempts at playing an angry Nancy galvanised into taking up arms
against Roark are ropey at best. Bruce Willis plays a ghost. Odd sense of déjà
vu there.
In
2005, before the full-on boom of movies based on comic books and graphic novels
that we’re experiencing now, Sin City
was unlike anything else out there. It was striking, bold and impactful. Now,
the cool factor of the film being shot on a digital back-lot with everything
but the actors and key props computer-generated has subsided. As over the top
as A Dame to Kill For is, it falls
short of the visceral oomph the first film had. Comic book fans know Frank
Miller as a writer and artist who helped define the medium with the likes of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, but who seems to have
lost his mind, judging from the atrocious likes of Holy Terror and All Star
Batman and Robin. His misogynistic attitudes and obsession with dark
faux-poetry are on full display in Sin
City: A Dame to Kill For, Robert Rodriguez serving as little more than his
errand boy.
Summary: There’s no kill like overkill –Sin City: A Dame to Kill For brims with eye-catching imagery and
uncompromising depictions of violence and sex, but there is little beneath its
glossy, lurid surface.
RATING:
2.5 out of 5 Stars
Jedd Jong
