Movie review ‘Sin City: A Dame To Kill For’: Too much sin, not enough soul

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Eva Green, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis

Directed by: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 100 minutes

Rating: * * *

If you’re heading for the latest superhero film, be it Captain America, or a version of Spiderman, the X-Men, Avengers etc, your viewing experience won’t be affected to any great degree by whether or not you follow the comic books. The mythology of these heroes, their back-stories, what their lives and adventures involve, is now fairly commonly known, and while being a diehard fan of the comic books may make you more eager perhaps to see their stories retold on the screen, and help you pick up on a few more nuances than other moviegoers — fandom is not a prerequisite to follow the film itself.

Strictly speaking, you don’t need to have read the Sin City graphic novels by Frank Miller to watch the films based on it. The original Sin City film came out in 2005, and was co-directed by Miller, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. The sequel, A Dame To Kill For has just hit the theatres, without Tarantino this time. Micky Rourke and Jessica Alba continue from the original film’s cast, as does Bruce Willis in a special appearance; Eva Green, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin are among the newcomers.

The four chapters in A Dame To Kill For are a mix of material from the comic books, and new stories that Miller wrote specifically for the screen, and the style (that was so startlingly original in the first film — monochromatic, with the occasional flash of bright colour, with many of Miller’s stunning visuals from the comics faithfully recreated on screen) has the added benefit of being rendered in 3D this time.

Having read the comic books will make the setting — Basin City, a gritty metropolis so rotten, “it soils everything it touches” — familiar to you. It will also mean that you’re on first name basis with many of the characters — exotic dancer Nancy Callahan (Alba), femme fatale Ava Lord (Green) and Marv (Rourke) — and their stories. That should help you with those moments in the film when severe censoring snips off entire scenes that are essential in establishing the story’s progression, or when the narrative jumps in a non-linear fashion. It gives you the context for the dialogues that might otherwise seem cheesy and for plots that might otherwise seem hackneyed.

But knowing, and loving, Miller’s graphic novels puts you at a disadvantage as well: You can’t just look at Sin City: A Dame To Kill For as a shoot-’em-up enterprise with lots of sex thrown in. You compare the film to the comics and you’re left with a sense that this big screen retelling hasn’t touched on the genius that was Miller’s work on paper: In the Sin City comics, Miller created art that was three-dimensional on a medium that was two-dimensional. Seeing those images in what is in any case a three-dimensional medium doesn’t wow you as having the same level of innovation. And Miller’s stories and characters had a heart to them that A Dame To Kill For lacks.

The lack of heart in the film is troubling, because even as you watch the slick images unfold on screen, you know something is missing: It makes the characters seem a little like cardboard cutouts, which is a shame considering how wonderfully well most of the cast has acted. You see the lack most in the chapter that gives the movie its title, the Josh-Brolin-Eva Green starrer, in which Green is the “dame” every man who crosses her path would kill for. In that sense, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt chapter The Long, Bad Night fares the best: It hinges completely on the actor, playing an impossibly lucky gambler called Johnny, whose winning streak brings him up against Basin City’s arch villain Senator Roark (played by Power Boothe). Jessica Alba performs well in her chapter, Nancy’s Last Dance, which sees her unraveling after the death of her lover and protector (played by Bruce Willis) even as she seeks vengeance.

There’s a moment in Nancy’s Last Dance when Alba’s character is watching a Western on her television: Two cowboys mouth the film’s famous lines, “This rotten town, it soils everyone it touches”. If you’re a fan of the Sin City franchise, you’ll notice that the cowboys are none other than Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, the film’s creators. Miller and Rodriguez seem self-conscious, their delivery, wooden — and it strikes a somewhat jarring note in a scene where Alba’s Nancy is doing a pretty good job of expressing her angst at being left behind by the one person she thought would protect her forever.

The moment makes you remember, in the brief space of time that you might have forgotten, that none of this real — not Sin City or its people, and for a film that invests so much time, money and artistry in trying to tell you otherwise, that is a failure indeed.