The “Sin City” movies are tantamount to warped cartoons. They showcase gaudy digital sets and slam-bang effects as live-action performers struggle to act out a smorgasbord of lurid wish fulfillments – teenage-boy variety. When up-and-coming actors and established stars take roles in lousy G-rated cartoons, you think, “They just wanted their kids to see them as animated characters.”
Watching the infinitely hollow and interminable “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” you wonder whether the cast agreed to get fingers cracked and eyes gouged to impress juvenile-delinquent relatives. Any actor who steps into the black-and-white urban nightmare created by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez from Miller’s extreme-crime comics must endure horrendous brutality or embody pitiless corruption.
Stacy Keach appears in one scene as a whale-like kingpin with growths crawling up his neck. Keach has been a great King Lear, but he can do nothing with the role of Mr. Wallenquist; the visual effects and makeup turn his profile into a slagheap and hide his expressions behind spectacles coated with Wite-Out. This puny version of a Mr. Big exists only to help set up the final confrontation between the film’s hero, Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin), a private investigator, and his sometime lover – the “dame to kill for” in the title, Ava (Eva Green).
In the central story, Miller and Rodriguez treat Ava as the ultimate femme fatale, able to pose as a “princess bride” to her wealthy husband (Marton Csokas), a “damsel in distress” to the private eye, and a “goddess” to her formidable chauffeur-bodyguard, Manute (Dennis Haysbert).
In Green they have a slinky, buxom, lynx-eyed performer who’s also intelligent and passionate. With better material she could have pulled it off. But Miller and Rodriguez exploit her provocative beauty with a joyless, titillating cynicism. And they saddle her with lines that are neither eloquent as straight talk nor funny as parody, including the ones that inspire Dwight first to belt her, then embrace her: “If you can’t love me, hate me. If you can’t forgive me, punish me.” (Is it too soon to say Lauren Bacall is turning over in her grave?)
In other “Sin City” relationship news, the not-so-incredible hulk named Marv (Mickey Rourke), self-appointed guardian of gold-hearted, despairing stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba), tells her she looks hot after she scars herself and goes on the attack against evil Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). In the first film, Roark destroyed the man who saved Nancy’s life, police detective John Hartigan (Bruce Willis). Hartigan shows up in this movie as an actual guardian angel. The only carefree flirtation in the movie comes between a snappy, confident card player (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a friendly stripper (Julia Garner), but once he beats Senator Roark at poker – well, you get the picture.
I can see why Miller’s original comics generated a cult. With florid words and images, he amps up the time-tested formulas of tough individualists treading mean streets with personal codes that don’t include charity or mercy. In his scabrous vision, heartless power brokers control cities and nurture every twisted vice within the urban family. The connections he draws between hard-luck men and troubled women give a pseudo-adult potency to male adolescent insecurity. Between covers, it can make for a fascinating spectacle. With real actors anchoring hyperbolic digital re-creations of Miller’s black-shadow cityscapes, it’s pummeling.
Rosario Dawson returns to lead the female warriors who guard Sin City’s Old Town with swords, guns and crossbows, wearing chains, studs and leather. Her most alluring and dangerous lieutenant is the samurai-like Miho (Jamie Chung). But the filmmakers undercut even Miho’s athletic brio. They use computer tricks and animation to italicize multiple beheadings and bulls-eye shots, bathing the carnage in bright splashes of white. (Gore-hounds, fear not: There’s lots of red blood in the movie, too.) They rob the set pieces of any real visceral pull. Throughout, the single-warrior combat is wearying. It simply leaves you wondering, “How many times can Dwight be thrown out of a window?”
Miller’s original comic-book frames serve narrative functions, but these movies are all grabby graphics, devoid of compelling style. There’s no doggerel rhyme or reason why a primary color pops up in the otherwise monochrome scenes, whether it’s a bar girl’s blond hair or the cherry red on a vintage Cadillac. It’s mostly just flash, impure and simple. The images sometimes reverse black and white, as if Miller and Rodriguez were trying to tell their tales in X-rays, smeared with blood.
“Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” flubs most of its attempts at black humor. I started to think of the movie as nothing more than a new punch line to an old joke: “What’s black and white and red all over?”
Contact the writer: msragow@ocregister.com
