Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

Movie Info

Green Eyes = Evil

Things are always bad in Sin City. Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hits the town as a gambler who can’t lose and targets Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) in his own game. Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) finds he might have to get a new face when he is made the patsy for Ava Lord (Eva Green). Marv (Mickey Rourke) goes out to get answers and also finds himself helping Nancy (Jessica Alba) seek revenge.

Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a comic book action noir adaptation. A sequel to Sin City from 2005, the film adapts stories from Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Sin City: Booze Broads, & Bullets, and features two original stories from creator Frank Miller. The film was a critical and financial failure.

Sin City was rather divisive. Like 300, the film was highly stylized and that won viewers or was off-putting to viewers. I (for the most part) liked Sin City and found it a fun ride. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For just felt like more of the same and a ride you wanted to stop.

The girls of Old Town should have just been the stars

Sin City collected the best aspects of Sin City, and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For feels like an incomplete movie as a result. The movie just feels like scraps of stories and incomplete. The original story involving Joseph Gordon-Levitt feels anticlimactic especially when paired with the original Nancy story which deals with the Roarke problem (and feels more like a fantasy than real life). The Dwight prequel story feels inconsequential since you know Dwight is alive in the original film (played by Clive Owen). The movie’s timeline also feels all catawampus when trying to figure out when Marv’s stories fit in.

The movie has a good and expansive cast. Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Powers Boothe, and Jaime King return, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green, Josh Brolin, Stacy Keach, Ray Liotta, Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Meloni, Juno Temple, and Lady Gaga were added. Jamie Chung replaces Devon Aoki as Miho, Jeremy Piven replaced Michael Madsen as Bob, and Dennis Haysbert replaced the late Michael Clarke Duncan as Manute. Directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez appear as Sam and Sam’s friend respectively.

Take likeable characters and make them dull

The visuals for Sin City and its sequel are love them or hate them in general. While I feel the stylized look worked better in the first film because it was rather new and edgy, it hasn’t really evolved here into anything different (nor does it really need to). The first film’s look was boosted by better stories.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a rather forgettable movie. It is a sequel that no one really asked for and that failed mostly because of that. The first film was an interesting experiment, but this film feels like a money-grab…which it turned out to be anything but. There was talk of a third film or a TV series, but nothing has yet to develop.

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Sin City (2005)