Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Maybe there’s little sense in asking a movie named Sin City: A Dame to Kill For to show some restraint; the title is a promise of naughty behavior left unchecked by laws and basic human morality. But if Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to his 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s hard-boiled neo-noir comic book series needs anything, it’s a healthy dollop of moderation. At only ninety-eight minutes in length, the film somehow manages to feel bloated compared to its predecessor, stuffed to the gunwales with an excess of excess. When severed heads tumble across the screen like fleshy soccer balls for the umpteenth time, all the visceral thrills of graphic dismemberment fade away. Who knew hyper violence could feel this routine?
Blame the source, then. Miller’s comics aren’t well known for holding back, and across his myriad black-and-white yarns there flows a veritable deluge of bloodshed coupled with liberal nudity. That’s the appeal, of course, and in Miller’s sparsely inked tomes it works (sometimes more successfully than others). In Rodriguez’s movies, the same qualities strike with the subtlety of a jackhammer. That’s not a big deal, really, because nuance has never been Rodriguez’s bag, but his screen treatments of the Sin City brand illustrate the problems with taking comic book adaptations to literal extremes: what plays nicely on the page won’t necessarily play quite so smoothly when set in motion.
So Sin City: A Dame to Kill For stumbles hard on its own indulgences. That’s not to say the affair is a total wash; when the film finds a groove, it’s a grimy, stellar-looking piece of stylish debauchery. But Rodriguez (nominally co-directing with Miller) has the devil’s time finding that groove, much less maintaining it for more than twenty minutes. Four new micro narratives are on the slate this go-round: cocky gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) plays a dangerous game with the nefarious Senator Roark (Powers Boothe); Dwight (Josh Brolin) confronts an old flame (Eva Green, the eponymous dame) and falls into a labyrinth of sexual deception; Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) plots her revenge against Rourke for the death of John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) in the previous film; and Marv (Mickey Rourke) goes out for a skull-busting night on the town to cure his boredom.