Sin City:
A Dame To Kill For

Sin City blew our minds and eyes back in 2005, and the sequel doesn’t disappoint.

Like its predecessor, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is a film noir about gin joints, smoke-filled backrooms, sultry temptresses and tortured souls leaping from the pages of a graphic novel straight onto the screen and into our imaginations. Of course, it’s not just one tale. It’s three.

First, we have Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – the luckiest gambler in Sin City, who decides to interject himself into a high stakes and higher danger poker game with the evil Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). The Senator is all powerful, and he doesn’t like to lose, so why is Johnny running afoul of this man?

Second, we have Dwight (Josh Brolin) – a detective who doesn’t want to do it, but comes running when his femme fatale former lover, Ava (Eva Green), asks for a favor because she is in danger. What does she need Dwight to do, and will he be able to resist her charms?

Finally, we revisit Nancy (Jessica Alba) – the stripper rescued by the only honest cop in Sin City, John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), in the last movie. Since his death, she has been haunted by his memory, which drives her into madness and compels her to seek vengeance against the man she blames, Senator Roark. Can Nancy do what no one else in Sin City has been able to do?

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is a sumptuous visual feast for the eyes engulfing the audience in a dark, bleak world where every beaten, defeated character with a dead soul questions if there is any possible escape (kind of like how Bruce Jenner felt whenever he was on screen during Keeping Up With The Kardashians).

Directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, along with the best art department in the business, stun us with some of the most sleek and stylish art work you will see in any movie. In Sin City, we were amazed someone could make a graphic novel come to life in such vivid fashion as to make us think we had fallen into the pages and started swimming around in them, but, in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, we are just as amazed at how the world comes to life through the hard boiled, pulp dialogue rolling off the tongues of a cast born to play the roles.

With a 9-year lull between movies, Rodriguez and Miller could do a better job re-introducing the returning characters, since many people watching this installment have never seen the first one (or haven’t seen it in 9 years), but the new characters kind of blow us away enough to make up for it.

Eva Green is on fire as a dangerous damsel in distress who uses her sex appeal like a nuclear bomb to get what she wants when she wants, no matter the cost to others around her. She produces enough steam to power a locomotive from Boston to Los Angeles and back again, while Gordon-Levitt is acting the living daylights out of a character that needs a better story and explanation for his tale. He seems built for the film noir age, but born a few decades too late as we watch him walk across the screen like a modern day John Garfield.

The violence and tone is not for everyone, but Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an amazing movie if you give it a chance.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is rated R for strong brutal stylized violence throughout, sexual content, nudity, and brief drug use.