Starring: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Eva Green, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Powers Booth
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
Synopsis: Some of Sin City’s most hard-boiled citizens cross paths with a few of its more reviled inhabitants.
Let’s start off by saying that Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is not as good as the first Sin City. It’s still visually fantastic but so much water has passed under the bridge since the first film (nearly ten years) that it’s kind of lost it’s allure. Unfortunately, as much as I love the guy, Robert Rodriguez was off making sub par Grindhouse homages when he should have been concentrating making Sin City some sort of fantastic, cohesive trilogy (I’m sure there will probably be another installment some when).
This isn’t a follow on from the original film, like a Graphic Novel, it’s just a different story. It features some of the key players from the first film, mainly Mickey Rourke’s Marv and Jessica Alba’s Nancy. Some of the new characters include Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a arrogant young gambler, Josh Brolin as Dwight (replacing Clive Owen from the original movie) and Eva Green as a barely dressed femme-fatal.
I can’t say any of the storylines were overly interesting compared with the original movie, but it’s still visually nice to look at, and I wasn’t ever bored, which is a criticism that has been leveled at the movie elsewhere.
I won’t go into the storyline as, once again, there are more than one. I will say that if you were a fan of the first film, I can’t see why you wouldn’t like this one. There is the same hard boiled noirish feel to the movie, the same levels of violence and gore and the same array of misfits and crazies as previously seen.
But, as mentioned before, due to the amount of time that has passed between the two movies, it just didn’t have that ‘wow’ factor this time around. And because the second time around is never going to have that feel of seeing something you’ve never seen before (the first film was certainly quite cutting edge at the time) then the film itself has to be really good, and it never really hits those heights unfortunately.
A noble effort but, unfortunately, ten years too late. Now Robert, move on to pastures new and prove to us how talented you really are!
