Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
In 2005, director Robert Rodriguez released his adaptation of Frank Miller’s classic comic book series, Sin City, sharing the directing duties with Miller himself. It was a near panel-for-panel translation of several stories from the series, and the entire film looked like a graphic novel come to life, coated in black and white except for sudden bursts of color. It was absurd and incredibly striking.
Now, nine years after the original, Rodriguez and Miller return with a new film composed of a new batch of interlocking tales of crime, sex, murder and all manner of dark acts.
Like its predecessor, A Dame to Kill For is set in the fictional Basin City, a crime-infested embodiment of film noir tropes festering somewhere out in the American West. The evil Roark family has ruled Sin City from its inception, enforcing order through violence and manipulation. Meanwhile, an army of prostitutes controls the ramshackle, downtrodden region of the city known as Old Town. Private investigators and drunken brutes alike prowl the rainy streets, spending their nights at the bottom of a bottle in a strip club more often than not.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For follows a group of characters befitting its seedy setting: There’s Marv (Mickey Rourke, Java Heat), a large and dangerous man who spends his time protecting the dancers of Katie’s Strip Club, including Nancy (Jessica Alba, Machete Kills), the most famous of Katie’s dancers. There’s Dwight (Josh Brolin, Guardians of the Galaxy), a private eye with a dark and troubled past who reunites with Ava Lord (Eva Green, 300: Rise of an Empire), the titular dame to kill for. And then there’s Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Jon), a smirking gambler determined to confront Senator Roark (Powers Boothe, Straight A’s), the Big Bad of Sin City.
Given the title, it should come as no surprise that the film delights in sex and violence, ratcheting both up to an almost comical degree. Killer prostitutes dress in elaborate skimpy costumes while wielding submachine guns and katanas. Blood splatters across the screen, colored white against the dark backdrop of the city. Heads roll, faces are torn apart, eyes get plucked out and throats are cut. It’s pretty brutal.
The film delights in this brutality, in a sinking sentiment that the villains will always win and anyone who’s considered a hero could turn sides at any moment. Yet it’s tempered by a hilarious sense of exaggeration; its self-aware over-the-top nature plays the violence for laughs more often than not.
That’s not to say the film is without its truly troubling aspects. Because of its very nature as a film noir cranked up to 11, there’s hardly a woman in the film who’s not overly sexualized. Though it deliberately portrays the men drooling over the women in the strip club in a negative light, it still lingers hungrily itself over every exposed bit of skin. One could make the argument that it’s intentionally putting the audience in the voyeuristic view of the patrons, forcing them to confront their role in these women’s lives, but it’s also just as likely that it’s simply enjoying the view. These elements are definitely problematic, though somewhat tempered by the fact that many of the women in the film are more conniving and deadly than the men. Most of them aren’t passive objects.
It’s also somewhat obvious that the original film took most of the comic’s better storylines, leaving the sequel to pick through the few left over and add new ones. These feel like sequel and prequel territory because they are; neither Marv’s nor Dwight’s story in this film (both prequel material) feels as necessary or important as their struggles in the first Sin City. And when Sin City split one of its storylines (“That Yellow Bastard”)in two, it did so at a natural moment, at a break of many years passing. A Dame to Kill For’s split occurs at an almost random moment, in a story that doesn’t quite seem necessary.
Overall, fans of the original Sin City, film noir or over-exaggerated killing fests in the vein of Quentin Tarantino will find a lot to like in this sequel. It has all the problems of the original without quite living up to its gleeful heights, but it’s still an enjoyable action film that looks like nothing else in theaters. Make sure to keep in mind the film’s self-conscious over-the-top quality, and you’ll enjoy one of the better blockbusters of the summer.
