Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For

Tim­ing is a bitch. Or, in the inter­est of evok­ing imagery that’s more attuned to the misog­y­nis­tic hellscape of Frank Miller’s ​‘Sin City’: tim­ing is a cold-blood­ed whore in ass­less chaps who will suck a man dry if you give her half the chance. Nine years ago, when Miller and Robert Rodriguez first trans­posed the former’s graph­ic nov­el series into a film, it felt as though they were on the van­guard, using dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to bridge dis­parate medi­ums in a way that vivid­ly illus­trat­ed how the two informed one another.

A pulpy mono­chrome fan­ta­sia punc­tured by bursts of high-con­trast colour, Sin City was less of a movie than it was a series of illus­trat­ed pan­els brought to life. It may not have been great, but at least it was new.

But that was 2005, and nev­er before has quite so much time passed in just nine years. That’s long enough for one Spi­der-Man fran­chise to end, and anoth­er to begin and self-destruct. For bet­ter or worse, the world of graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tions has evolved almost as dras­ti­cal­ly as the world beyond them. What was once nov­el has now become suf­fo­cat­ing­ly ubiq­ui­tous, and what was tol­er­a­ble has now become insuf­fer­ably regressive.

Com­ic books have shown that peo­ple would rather drink out of tox­ic water than build a new well, and — even despite the extend­ed gap — there’s real­ly no good rea­son that it should feel so intrin­si­cal­ly jar­ring and anachro­nis­tic to revis­it the world of Sin City. And yet, from its Adobe Flash-like ani­ma­tion to its des­per­ate hyper-vio­lence and its deeply entrenched misog­y­ny, A Dame to Kill For feels as woe­ful­ly out of touch as a Dar­ren Wil­son sup­port protest. The dig­i­tal var­nish is inher­ent­ly ill-suit­ed to the rough and tum­ble grime of Sin City and its end­less cor­rup­tion, the two aes­thet­ics mix­ing togeth­er like vine­gar and cof­fee. It was eas­i­er to over­look in 2005 because the var­i­ous sto­ries that com­prised that first Sin City anthol­o­gy had at least a mod­icum of nar­ra­tive intrigue. No such luck here.

By the time the sequel arrives at its open­ing title card it’s already irrev­o­ca­bly clear how stag­ger­ing a mis­cal­cu­la­tion it was to think that peo­ple might want to spend 100 more min­utes in a glo­ri­fied tech demo that reeks of cre­ative pover­ty and the crusty musk of rot­ting old men. From the moment that Mick­ey Rourke’s Marv lum­bers back onto the screen look­ing like the rean­i­mat­ed corpse of Burt Lan­cast­er, it’s hard to fath­om how Miller and Rodriguez were con­vinced that peo­ple might still give a shit about these char­ac­ters and their laugh­ably basic tails of hard­boiled cynicism.

This return trip to Unpleas­antville is true to its pulp roots in that it’s both a pre­quel and a sequel to the pre­vi­ous install­ment, swerv­ing between the two with the free­dom of a film that knows it doesn’t mat­ter. Fea­tur­ing all sorts of lowlife men and exact­ly one sort of woman (whores), A Dame to Kill For unfolds like a 13-year-old boy hav­ing a wet dream dur­ing The Big Sleep, each of its four most­ly unre­lat­ed chap­ters more pruri­ent and less inter­est­ing than the one before it. And while there isn’t much in the way of a nar­ra­tive through-line hold­ing these sto­ries togeth­er, the seg­ments are linked by a shared obses­sion with pow­er and its com­pet­ing cur­ren­cies of sex and violence.

The first major chap­ter intro­duces John­ny (a slum­ming Joseph Gor­don-Levitt), a cocky gam­bler with a super­nat­ur­al win­ning streak and a death wish. The first thing John­ny does — after exhaust­ing his req­ui­site voiceover about how tough Sin City is, of course — is to grab him­self a good luck charm pros­ti­tute and get involved in a tru­ly non­sen­si­cal pok­er game run by a cor­rupt sen­a­tor played by Pow­ers Boothe. That bleeds into the tit­u­lar tale, that revis­its (and recasts) char­ac­ters from the 2005 film in order to put a new spin on the old­est noir tale in the book.

Cast­ing the lumi­nous and fer­al Eva Green as the epony­mous femme fatale — a manip­u­la­tive and per­pet­u­al­ly top­less man-eater who has the likes of Josh Brolin and Christo­pher Mel­oni wrapped around her fin­ger — is both the movie’s sav­ing grace and also the most lucid exam­ple of why A Dame to Kill For is so trag­i­cal­ly lost in time. Green’s pre­dictably stir­ring per­for­mance is as unhinged as it is undressed, so dwarf­ing the movie around it that you can’t help but despair at how the actress was born too late to work with the likes of Hawks and Pre­minger, and is forced by cir­cum­stance to be in a cheap fac­sim­i­le of a film noir instead of the real thing. She could have been Lau­ra, instead, she’s just a pair of green eyes in a dark night of shit.

By the time the movie limps towards its final chap­ter, in which Jes­si­ca Alba repris­es her role as a bur­lesque dancer for a bar full of men too hag­gard to be horny (among whom Frank Miller is an all too fit­ting extra), it’s clear that all of these sto­ries are just riffs on the same idea: men are pow­er­less against a woman in leather, and deeply bit­ter about that. None of the women in Sin City are bad, they’re all just drawn that way. And even when Alba cuts up her own face in order to tran­scend her sta­tus as a totem of male lust, her ser­rat­ed scars are imme­di­ate­ly co-opt­ed as a fetish object of their own.

Sin City is the world as seen from the front row of a strip club so seedy that it reaf­firms every back­wards puri­tan notion about the rela­tion­ship between sex and shame. The only way to avoid becom­ing a pawn in this sticky car­toon mess of pow­er dynam­ics is just to stay home.