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The city’s like it always was. The men are relentlessly hard-boiled, and the women are innocent, doe-eyed dames — until they stab you in the back. In 2005, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller collaborated to bring Sin City to the big screen. The original film dazzled audiences with its unique mix of live action and animation, and while the sequel maintains the lush comic-book visuals, it loses some of the impact — we’ve seen it all before.
In addition to the stark, stylish visuals, the vignette structure of the original returns, as Rodriguez and Miller adapt the eponymous story and another short tale from the Sin City books, combined with two original narratives created by Miller for the film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Johnny, a cocksure card shark on a mission to infiltrate a high-stakes poker game run by corrupt senator Roarke (an exquisitely terrifying Powers Boothe). Despite being a new character, Johnny feels like a natural addition, seamlessly entering the world of Sin City. His story is filled with some of the strongest cameos, notably Lady Gaga as a tough-talking but kind-hearted waitress (reminiscent of Brittany Murphy’s Shellie in the original).
In the title tale, Dwight McCarthy is back, with Josh Brolin taking over from Clive Owen as the alcoholic PI who makes a grim living catching men cheating on their wives (including a fun cameo from Ray Liotta, caught in a compromising position with Juno Temple). Terrified of “letting the monster out”, Dwight struggles to keep control, until Eva Green arrives as “the dame to kill for”, Ava Lord. The two have a history together, and Dwight knows she’s bad news, but he can’t resist — Ava is a “goddess” who “makes slaves of men”. Green is truly sublime, and her performance alone is worth the price of the admission ticket. An instantly iconic femme fatale, she recalls the deadly and seductive Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) as she lures Dwight into a merciless honey trap, telling him, “Sex always made you stupid.”
Both Rodriguez and Miller have been criticised for their treatment of women as angels or whores, but Sin City is obviously an homage to the noir thrillers in which women reject traditional gender roles as wives and mothers, and instead exploit their unique sex appeal to manipulate male characters to gain independence and power. Although the men in Sin City are more physically and economically powerful than the women, they are also frequently naive and foolish in their lust. Dwight laments, “She owns me, body and soul.” In one fantastic scene, Ava masterfully manipulates Christopher Meloni’s Mort; we see him laying awake all night before eventually calling her. She picks up the phone in the bath, with a roll of her eyes, before playing perfectly to her audience with the exact lines he wants to hear.
As the story turns to Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), the film begins to lag. Nancy seeks to avenge the death of her boyfriend John (Bruce Willis), who didn’t make it past the first film. However, Willis returns here in an exceptionally dull role as his ghost, grumbling “Don’t avenge me, Nancy”, looking mournful, and doing little else. Nancy has gone off the rails a little since we last saw her, and spends most of the film drinking too much, crying in her dreary apartment, chopping her hair off, or visiting John’s grave in bizarre Stevie Nicks-inspired shawls. Although she is supposedly falling apart before our eyes, Alba doesn’t quite have the acting skills to carry the scenes, and Nancy remains as bland at the end as she was at the beginning.
Yet even in these weaker moments, the film is still gorgeously rich to look at. For those who enjoyed the original, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For will not disappoint.
