Back in 2005, Robert Rodriguez managed to do the impossible and bottle the impossibly gritty lightning of Frank Miller’s cult, hyper-noir comic, Sin City. He did this by realising that, instead of trying to change the distinctive aesthetic of the series, he simply stuck the black and white visuals up on the screen wholesale and the result was an audacious triumph that arguably stands as probably the best movie the inventive auteur has ever made.
Time passed, as time often does, and in the years since, comic book movies went from being profitable to going super fucking nova as every studio and its dog struggled to find the next big thing to be found within the pages of a graphic novel. However, while there were success stories that didn’t rely on capes and superpowers, conspicuous by their absence was the remaining stories of Miller’s decadent and sordid anthology that hadn’t yet made it to the screen.
In 2014, Rodriguez and Miller made good on their promise and teamed to make Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, which would finally adapt one of the more famous, monochromatic tales, but after a gap of nine years, did anyone actually want to walk the streets of Sin City once again?
As we once again tip our toes in the rancid, oily puddles of Basin City, we find that its time to catch up with the hapless psychos and downtrodden lowlifes that trawl the underbelly of a city that make New York of the 70s look like shangri la. As before, our guide to start off with is the irrepressible Marv, a hulking brute of a man with right-angle features and a “condition” that usually means that anyone standing in his way will get pounded into a mushy sludge. After he has a little mini adventure where he brings his thuggish justice to a group of vagrant burning rich kids, we get re-aquainted with some more of Sin City’s regulars.
First, we find that after the aftermath of the first movie, stripper Nancy Callahan is still mourning the self sacrifice John Hartigan made to keep her safe, but between bouts of writhing around on the catwalk, Nancy gas hit the bottle pretty hard while the ghost of her saviour looks on sadly.
While Nancy plots vengence on the man responsible for all of her pain, the absurdly corrupt Senator Roark, we find that someone else has fixed him in his crosshairs – smug gambler Johnny – who wants to make his name by being the man who gets known for defeating the undetectable as a cutthroat game of cards. However, Roark isn’t about to let his notorious nature take a hit because of some young punk, but what will prove to be stronger, the brutality of his rule or Johnny’s will to win?
Finally, we catch up with Dwight McCarthy before his plastic surgery to find that before he looked like Clive Owen, he looked an awful lot like Josh Brolin and as the cold hearted and manipulative temptress, Ava Lord stalks back into his life, he finds himself set up by a woman who has all the mercy of a great white shark.
There’s a sense that the existence of Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is less about Robert Rodriguez taking care of business by transporting more of Miller’s two-fisted tales to the big screen, and more about the director trying to pull himself out of the Grindhouse/Spy Kids sludge pit he’d found himself in. While the director himself would undoubtedly deny this (and he’d know more than me, to be honest), as a fan of his earlier, tighter stuff, two Machete movies and a bunch of kids films simply wasn’t cutting it for the man who gave us Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn and I hungered for more of the good stuff. However, there was a real feeling that the seemingly tireless director was finally taking on too much what with the ludicrous schedule the man keeps and this never felt more apparent than feeling the crushing disapointment that came with viewing Sin City 2.
To be honest, I’m not exactly sure why the first film resonated like a pistol whip to the skull and the second flopped soggily like a rain drenched newspaper, but I’ve certainly got some theories. The first could easily be that everyone involved didn’t try to capitalize on the series until a staggering nine years later when the superhero genre already had cinema in a super strong chokehold and as a result it seemed that Rodriguez had lost the balance he had once had. What was a starkly and stylishly brutal tone back in 2005 now felt dated, or worse yet, a bit silly as this selection of enigmatic thugs and slinky femme fatales now seemed like a ludicrous parody rather than a thrillingly exaggerated mega-noir that dialled up all the tropes to eleven like an excited Nigel Tufnel.
Another issue is that sharing a director’s credit is Frank Miller himself who apparently didn’t take the utter failure of The Spirit as a massive warning sign that maybe he should stay away from directing. While I’m unaware of the true directing ratio between Rodriguez and Miller, it’s a shame they didn’t use a screening of Stephen King’s directing debut, Maximum Overdrive, to dissuade Miller from getting even further involved.
Whatever the reason is, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For simply doesn’t work. The continuing of various plot threads (some created especially for the movie) just doesn’t peak the interest; did anyone out there really have a hankering to find out what happened to Nancy Callahan next after Hartigan blew his brains out? Similarly, some of the new character also fail to measure up to the classics with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s vengful Johnny remaining impressively dull despite having his dealing hand mangled into the shape of a manicured pretzel by stern-faced goons. Most unforgivable of all is that the movie even fumbles with Mickey Rourke’s fan favourite, Marv, overusing him to the point of over saturation and thus dulling his distinctive edge.
Still, it isn’t all bad. A rumbling Josh Brolin and a rarely clothed Eva Green seem positively made for this universe (with Green scoring her second, failed, Miller adaption in a single year with this and 300: Rise Of An Empire) and more of a gloating Powers Booth (in his final role) and a glowering Rosario Dawson can only be a good thing. But a handful of casting changes prove to be a little distracting and the absence of Clive Owen means that poor Brolin has to wear a cursed prosthetic and a dreadful wig in order to resemble a later-stage Dwight that’s likely to draw out more than it’s fair share of unintentional chuckles.
Apparently, if you walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything. Well, guess Rodriguez and co. must have wandered into the wrong one, because they failed to find a sequel that’s actually worth a damn.
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