Like the man said, there are eight million stories in the naked city, so it’s too bad that co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller couldn’t come up with a few better than these.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a relatively lifeless rehashing of the same visual tricks and hardboiled-to-the-point-of-self-parody storylines and dialogue of 2005’s original Sin City. Both are based on Miller’s neo-noir comics series, and every frame employs the same black-and-white-with-occasional-bursts-of-color stylization of those books. It’s pleasurable to look at, and that’s even setting aside the fact that actress Eva Green spends much of the film displaying her physical assets.
The problem is that the interlocking and overlapping tales — all about violence, sex, and revenge and set in a fictional American city that’s an overflowing sewer of lawlessness and corrupt power — are unremarkable. The antagonists don’t match the creepy nastiness of the sadistic psychos who populated the original movie.
The title dame, Ava Lord (Green), is an awful human being, but she’s not particularly scary. Actor Joseph Gordon Levitt’s storyline, about a hotshot young gambler out to prove something to powerful Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) fizzles into nothing. And by the time stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba) had taken steps to avenge the death of John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), I couldn’t help but roll my eyes as her narration pronounced, with a faux profundity I could no longer pretend to take seriously, “this rotten town, it soils everything.”
