Sin City 2 – A Dame to Die for

"Sin City 2 – A Dame to Die for "

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

Eva Green Is The Queen Of Sexy-Scary. “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” does have one thing that the first installment didn’t: a scene-stealing Eva Green, who, as Ava Lord, burns a giant hole in the center of the screen. In a movie in which Jessica Alba humps a stage and Mickey Rourke plucks out someone’s eyeball like he’s picking a particularly stubborn daisy, it’s not easy to be the center of attention, but Green easily dominates the gritty, gory affair. Her Ava is less femme fatale than dark deity, a goddess of self-destruction who men can’t help but cower in front of.

Take a left out of Sin City and you eventually arrive at Sin City 2, a deodorised postcode specialising in stage-managed danger. On the face of it, the landscape appears identical to Rodriguez and Miller's original 2005 picture. It boasts the same lush comic-book visuals, the same rasping gumshoe narration and many of the old familiar locals (Mickey Rourke's beat-up pug; Jessica Alba's gun-toting pole dancer). But the thrill has gone or at the very least dwindled. This sequel offers a congested spaghetti junction of interlocking stories, all of which are leading no place in particular.

This is not to say there is not some fun to be had amid the overheated twists and turns. Rodriguez and Miller trade in disreputable teenage kicks and they lay the style on with a trowel. The film is also played with the requisite gusto by Josh Brolin as a hapless private eye and Eva Green as his raven-haired femme fatale. I'm tempted to view Green's character as the perfect embodiment of the directors' cock-eyed sexual politics, in that she is a beautiful witch, at once arousing and deadly. Time and again, Rodriguez and Miller invite us to ogle her and then detest her, ogle her and then repent. The effect is akin to being led around a red-light district by a conflicted Pentecostal preacher. He's pointing out the sights and bellowing damnation in your ear.

Nine years after the release of Sin City comes this sequel/prequel. Like the first, it is written by Frank Miller, adapted from his graphic novels, and directed by he and Robert Rodriguez. Together, Miller and Rodriguez create another highly stylized, mostly black and white, comic book noir that is a world like no other. The plot tropes and conventions are straight out of an old film noir, while the visuals, violence and nudity give it a modern spin.
The plot is several different stories intertwined, with some characters and locations appearing in several of them. All of them are set in Sin City, the nickname for Basin City, which feels like an Art Deco New York City set on the West Coast. It's a dark place where it seems to be perpetually night, almost always raining, and where the characters spend lots of time in back alleys, cheap hotel rooms and saloons. The kind of place, as Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) puts it, "where you go in with your eyes open, or you don't come out at all."

Most of the film takes place prior to the events of the first Sin City. This allows Mickey Rourke's Marv to play a large part, even though he died in the electric chair in that earlier film. He's still an unstoppable tank with memory and anger issues. He appears in all of the stories, playing a major part in some and just briefly in others. He helps Dwight (Josh Brolin) rescue the dame to kill for of the title, played by Eva Green, who, in the manner typical of femme fatales of film noir, isn't all that she seems. He also helps Nancy (Jessica Alba) get revenge against Senator Roark for the death of Hartigan (Willis) in the first film. Willis makes a return as a ghostly figure who haunts young Nancy. In the film's other story, Marv makes merely a cameo, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Johnny, a lucky young gambler out to prove himself in Sin City, but he soon gets in over his head.
Although Marv remains an entertaining character, it's a couple of the new faces who steal the show. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is terrific as the cocky young Johnny. All of the main characters end up narrating parts of their story and the dialogue is as stylized as the visuals. It takes a certain kind of commitment to really sell it and Gordon-Levitt is particularly good at it. Eva Green as Ava, is the other new face who steals scenes, although in her case, it's not just her face doing the stealing. She spends most of her scenes naked and Rodriguez and Miller show off her curves with great style. She's a deadly dame, using her body and femininity to wrap the male characters around her pretty little fingers.
Josh Brolin plays Dwight, who was played by Clive Owen in the first film. The difference in their looks is explained by plastic surgery. In fact, Owen was supposed to show up at the end of the film, after the surgery, but was busy filming another movie and so Brolin is made up rather unsuccessfully to look like Owen instead. Dwight's story is the longest in the film, but Brolin's version of him is rather dull, lacking the spark of charisma that Owen brought to the part.

Like Brolin, Jessica Alba's story seems lacking as well. She certainly looks good, but Alba isn't very convincing as the good girl gone bad. The one driving herself insane with a lust for revenge. Even at her darkest, she still comes across too clean and too pretty.

Along with the main cast, many famous faces pop up in small roles. Ray Liotta, Stacy Keach, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Lloyd, Juno Temple and perhaps most bizarrely, Lady Gaga, all show up in cameo appearances. Although it's interesting to see them, all of these cameos become a little disconcerting and have the effect of taking you out of the story at times, becoming almost a game of "spot the celebrity".

Like most sequels this one is weaker than the original. Perhaps it's just that being the sequel, we've seen some of this before and maybe it's that the different story threads here don't seem as tightly woven, with some of them introducing different characters who then have nothing to do with the rest of the story, like the disfigured character played by Stacy Keach, or the murdering philanderer played by Ray Liotta. These guys add color to the background, but not much to the story. Still, although this sequel may not be as fresh as the original, if you enjoyed that first instalment then you're bound to find plenty of things to like here.