Sin City
A close friend of mine told me that a screening of Sin City was one of the most uncomfortable experiences she’d ever had in a theatre. As various women were beaten and mutilated on screen she remembered the men in the audience snickering and calling out the characters soaking in fanboy gratitude.
I didn’t get it then but I do now. Co-directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez have returned nine years later with the second volume in their Sin City crime saga A Dame to Kill For and like the first film it doesn’t pay to be a woman. It doesn’t pay to be a man either of course — odds are you’ll end up beaten to a pulp and shot to pieces. If the first film was an excitingly hyper-stylistic exercise in genre nihilism this sequel is even more punishing and self-serving.
Now that the world building is taken care of and the novelty of the aesthetic has passed Miller and Rodriguez are left to rely on other crutches. (Zack Snyder with 300 and Watchmen took the comic book green screen style as far as it can go.) For this instalment they’ve adapted a couple of Miller’s original Sin City tales and added a new one written by Miller specifically for the film.
The first tale traces the rise and fall of Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a young gambler whose luck runs out when he challenges the corrupt Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) to a poker game. Elsewhere Dwight (Josh Brolin) a private investigator with a deeply dark and troubled past (all of the characters have dark and troubled pasts) is reluctantly reunited with an old flame Ava (Eva Green) who is terrified for her life and seeking help. Other characters live among the margins including the granite-faced thug Marv (Mickey Rourke) deadly stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba) and the ghost of dearly departed Hartigan (Bruce Willis). There’s even a Lady Gaga cameo.
For the first film Rodriguez used Miller’s comic book panels as storyboards basically transposing the page onto the screen. (Hence the co-director credit.) He does the same here shooting the entire film with green screen and filling in the black-and-white CGI details later. It still looks great. Mostly. Rodriguez’s films have looked increasingly cheap (hitting the bottom with last year’s Machete Kills) and sections of A Dame to Kill For are despairingly slick and cartoony like a PC game from the early ’90s.
The violence genre trappings and stereotypes are seductive and satisfying as they tend to be over-the-top and senseless. They’re also a testament to how regressive Miller and Rodriguez are in telling this particular tale. Miller is a comic book legend whose Batman and Daredevil tales are among the medium’s best. Unfortunately he’s more familiar to readers now as a grumpy conservative mouthpiece preoccupied with creating fascist tales that nobody wants to read.
Yeah the Sin City tales are a loving homage to hard-boiled crime stories where men were men and women weren’t much. They trade on the genre’s stereotypes acting as more of an illustrator’s exercise than boundary-pushing art. It’s all pretty and pointless. It’s also dreary and dispiriting after 90 minutes of empty-headed women enduring endless abuse at the hands of men. The first film acted like the epic it wanted to be noir archetypes buffeted by coolly animated snow and blood. By comparison A Dame to Kill For is suffocating cynical and boneheaded like a hacky stage play winking at grim misogyny.
You’ll say “But that’s what it’s all about!” You know the rules of the game going in and they’re uncompromising. Miller and Rodriguez have created a singularly stylized and seductive world; it’s unfortunate that they and their army of laptops couldn’t think of something better than this double dip.
