Film Review - Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (2014)

At the Theater - "Sin City: A Dame To Kill For" (2014) - 2005's Sin City was the ultimate guilty pleasure for those seeking an adult-oriented alternative to the mega-budgeted, CGI-infested, kid-friendly comic-book movie extravaganzas as well as a treat for fans of the comics from which the film was based upon - it was an unabashedly violent and sexy pulp anthology brimming with innovative shots and dynamic characters, with Co-Directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller apparently catching some kind of wild lightning in a bottle.

The two filmmakers, along with an assist from Tarantino, crafted a non-linear, neo-noirish, kick-ass cool experience that provided a refreshing spin on the hard-boiled crime fiction and revenge tales that popularized the 1940's and 50's.  Shot in glorious black and white, with excellent usages of shadows and stark backgrounds, the razor-sharp visual experience was delightfully, yet sparsely accentuated with vibrant colors to draw attention to certain character attributes.  Though I enjoyed the hell out of the 2005 film, it was not without its flaws:  some actors were apparently unaware of what kind of film they were in, delivering dialogue as if it were the first time they had read it, while an occasional vein of Frank Miller's campy goofballery bled through as hare-brained and lame events.  The negative aspects of the film were present but at a minimum.

Now here we are, nearly a decade after the first film, with the long-delayed follow-up, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For- filmmakers Rodriguez and Miller have returned, yet they've apparently lost touch with most of the elements that made the first film a positive, worthwhile venture.  Yes, there's an impressive cast, some nice cinematography and a handful of sequences of stylized action, yet the inspiration and heart is simply AWOL. The film has a substantially larger budget, yet somehow feels much cheaper- about halfway through the film I was contemplating where it would fall on my disappointing films of 2014 list...

"Just Another Saturday Night" (approximately 6 minutes and 30 seconds) - Mickey Rourke returns as the hulking lug, "Marv", in this quick, brutal and ultimately flat opening short.  A disoriented Marv awakens at the scene of a vehicular accident and finds himself having to piece together the night's events.  The narrative eventually finds our anti-hero tracking down a small group of vicious college kids who get their kicks from burning hobos alive.  This should have been a heckuva cool, energetic reintroduction, though feels strangely nasty and dull.

One aspect that bugged the ever-lovin' shit out of me while Rourke's Marv was onscreen was the practical makeup effects utilized with the character's face- they are drastically different from the original film, almost making him appear as an entirely different character.  I know Mickey Rourke's visage is an ever-changing mess of plastic to begin with, though a good makeup crew could have surely overcome that to have recreated his look from the first film.  Checking out the credit listings on IMDB.com, I discovered that the 2005 film, led by the excellent makeup effects guru, Greg Nicotero (AMC's The Walking Dead), employed a crew of 40 artists... Nicotero returns here, though this film boasts a surprisingly lean 4 makeup artists!  Apparently, makeup effects were not a priority in regards to this film's production budget.

7.0 out of 10


"The Long, Bad Night" (23 minutes) - The first of two original stories submitted by Miller for this film features Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Lookout) as "Johnny", a gambler on an impossible winning-streak who sets his sights on defeating the omnipotent "Senator Roark" (Powers Boothe) in a high-stakes, backroom poker game.

This particular segment starts off promisingly enough, though eventually collapses with a thoroughly disappointing conclusion that renders the segment ridiculously pointless- either the ending needed to be refashioned or the story should have been excised altogether.  There is that one cool effects shot which features a winning hand of cards symbolically slicing through a miniaturized character on the card table which will stick with me.

Levitt is solid here, though it's Boothe (Southern Comfort) as the villainous politician who steals every scene in which he's featured- the veteran actor chews some major scenery and it's a wonder he isn't landing more bad guy roles.  The Long Bad Night also features Julia Garner (We Are What We Are) as a young, impressionable waitress who takes a shine to Johnny, Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future) as a back-alley doctor who shoots up with heroine before his procedures and Lady Gaga as the sympathetic waitress at an all-night diner- she's surprisingly not bad.

I don't know what the hell they were aiming for with this one...

4.0 out of 10

"A Dame To Kill For" (approximately 46 minutes)  Josh Brolin (Mimic) stars as "Dwight", a troubled gumshoe who finds himself falling for the wicked charms of a conniving old flame, Eva Green's (Casino Royale) "Ava Lord".  This is the longest and strongest story arc of the film- expect a healthy dose of Green in all her juicy, nekkid glory as the bewitching femme fatale, while Brolin is surprisingly solid here.  I'm normally not much of a fan of the actor, yet I found myself debating whether or not he made a better Dwight than Clive Owen (Inside Man), who played the character in the '05 film.  That said, there are some decidedly bad makeup effects (here we go again) regarding Dwight's post-plastic surgery transformation- yes, he's made up to look like Owen in an effort to tie-in to first film, yet the work is pretty damned awful.

Dennis Haysbert (Heat) takes over the role of the towering chauffeur, "Manute", from the late Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile), while the sexy Rosario Dawson (The Rundown) returns as the dominatrix, "Gail".  Marv is recruited to assist our well-intentioned hero and a fight sequence between him and Manute is, um, eye-popping stuff...

Christopher Meloni (TV's Law & Order: SVU) portrays a detective who falls under Ava Lord's evil spell while Jeremy Piven (HBO's Entourage) replaces Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs) as his overly-opinionated partner, "Bob"- Madsen was truly awful in the 2005 film, so it's no substantial loss.

Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) portrays a desperate man looking to silence his favorite hooker, played by Juno Temple (Atonement), while Jaime King (Blow) returns to portray Old Town's twin call-girls, "Goldie" and "Wendy".

Jamie Chung (The Hangover Part II) steps in to assume the role of deadly little "Miho" here from Devon Aoki (pregnancy)- the mute assassin and defender of Old Town has a couple of nifty little moments to please the action crowd, though closeups of the actress's face are next to nil.

Stacy Keach (Road Games) is unrecognizable under a ton of prosthetic makeup as the powerful Basin City mob boss, "Wallenquist"- the blobular, scarred character looks campy and out of place and should have been introduced in a more dynamic fashion.

Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremecy) rounds out the notable cast of this particular segment as "Damien Lord", the ill-fated, wealthy tycoon husband of Ava Lord.

I enjoyed this particular yarn, yet it's simply not enough to carry the entire film...

8.0 out of 10

"Nancy's Last Dance" (approximately 19 minutes) - Jessica Alba reprises her role from the first film as the exotic dancer, "Nancy Callahan".  Set roughly four years after the events in "That Yellow Bastard", Nancy, now an alcoholic, is haunted (quite literally) by the suicide of the Detective (Bruce Willis) who saved her from the clutches of evil and obsessed with exacting revenge on those responsible for his death.

Looking back at the first film, Alba is substantially better as an actress here- then again, she's given far more opportunities to flex her chops. It does bug me that Basin City's premiere stripper never really takes anything off during her "performances"...

A bit more nitpicking: Marv parades around with two pump shotguns that fire as automatics while Nancy lays waste to several henchman with a pump-action crossbow!  For the life of me, I couldn't figure out where her endless supply of arrows were coming from... C'Mon, Man!

Bruce Willis's Detective "John Hartigan" glides in and out of the picture (in what amounts to an extended cameo) as the apparition who watches over Nancy, helpless as she descends into near madness.

Powers Boothe's Senator Roark returns for this particular story as the object of Nancy's vengeance while Alexa PenaVega has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a dancer.

There are a great deal of scenes in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For that take place in Kadie's Club Pecos and Saloon, where the late Brittany Murphy's "Shellie" frequented as a waitress in the first film and popped up intermittently in several different comic story-lines.  Out of respect for the actress's untimely passing, the filmmakers decided to retire Murphy's character. 

This is the second original story from Frank Miller showcased in the film and I never could quite get into it- I hated that Miller decided to add the notion that Nancy is Marv's sister (other fans of the comic will surely cry foul as it doesn't gel with the comics) and found myself underwhelmed with its abrupt conclusion.  As this story ends, the film's credits begin to roll in a strangely blunt manner- this sequel bears a 102 minute run-time while the 2005 film ran at just over 124 minutes... surely the experience could have benefited from at least one more short as a night-cap... one adapted from the existing Miller stories, of course.

6.5 out of 10

The two original stories from Writer/Co-Director Frank Miller are disappointingly lackluster while also creating a nightmare of discontinuity for those familiar with the first film.  It's as if two new writers/filmmakers, with precious little knowledge of the events of the first film, were brought in to hammer this sequel out as a mere obligation. Why couldn't Miller and Co-Director Robert Rodriguez have stuck with the formula of the first film by recreating the stories depicted in the comics/graphic novels?

One of the more substantially pleasing aspects of the 2005 film was with how long stretches of the film's sequences often matched the artwork featured in the comics panel for panel.  It's the new material and perplexing deviations of A Dame To Kill For that work against it.  This film has a lazy and slapped together feel, with a fleeting minimum of fresh innovation and very little of that kick-ass cool element which motored the first entry.  Rodriguez is nowhere near the promising filmmaker who burst onto the scene with 1992's El Mariachi and its 1995 bigger-budgeted, near-remake, Desperado, while if there's anything that 2008's The Spirit has taught us, it's that Frank Miller is not to be trusted as a Director tackling new material on his own terms.

There's fight scenes, chase scenes, shootouts and couple of gore shots to go with all the booze, broads and bullets... but it's rarely any kind of fun.  Sadly, this film's unceremonious treatment (by its filmmakers and producers) and subsequent abysmal box-office means there will not be a Sin City 3 arriving in theaters- perhaps Marv will eventually make his way to cable, though.

My call is to skip it in theaters and check it out as a rental.  It's not atrocious, though parts of it are...

All things considered -

6.5 out of 10

Director: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liotta, Christopher Meloni, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Lloyd, Jaime King, Juno Temple, Marton Csokas, Jamie Chung, Julia Garner, Alexa PenaVega and Lady Gaga
Run-Time: 102 minutes
MPAA: Rated R for strong brutal stylized violence throughout, sexual content, nudity, and brief drug use

For what it's worth-

Sin City (2005) - 8.5