The bloom is off the rose. Nine years removed from Robert Rodriguez‘s first turn with Frank Miller‘s Sin City, it appears they think the visual aesthetic that wowed us when it was new in 2005 will continue to wow us now. It doesn’t, and that was proven already once this year with 300: Rise of an Empire, and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For lands with a similarly dull thud. As a 102-minute visual effects reel it does offer some pretty images (an endlessly naked Eva Green chief among them) but my ears are still ringing from all the Dolby-enhanced, wet, bloody fist pounding this film delivers whenever the tinkling of broken glass or gruff voice over isn’t pummeling my senses.
Like the last installment, A Dame to Kill For, features a series of separate storylines, interwoven, but not necessarily connected. In fact, the best of the bunch featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a mysterious gambler with a score to settle with Sin City senator, Roark (Powers Boothe), goes MIA for an hour or so before we finally get to the bottom of what his deal is in the first place.
Another story features Josh Brolin as Dwight (taking over for Clive Owen) as he finds himself entangled with the dark temptress Ava (Green). Then we learn Jessica Alba as the stripper named Nancy, has a score of her own to settle as she’s still mourning the death of John Hartigan, again played by Bruce Willis only this time as a chatty ghost. Injected within these stories in a variety of ways is Mickey Rourke as the big bruiser Marv who likes to squash heads and pull out eyeballs.
What’s amazing is how well I can recollect everything that happened in this movie as if it’s burned in my memory and yet I can’t commit to saying it has anything resembling a story. Perhaps Rodriguez, co-directing with Miller, has found a way to combine 3-D and high-contrast black and white imagery to sear these images into my brain. Or, perhaps, it’s just the repetitive nature of each and every scene that made it so memorable. Either way, a few candied splashes of color, cranked up sound effects, Green’s breasts and endless tough-talking voice over only prove this to be a tough guy fetish feature attempting, much of the way, to pass itself off as a symbol of female empowerment. Ha!
It’s almost astonishing the gall Rodriguez and Miller have to traipse their female actors around in leather outfits leaving little to the imagination (or nothing at all in Green’s case) and pretend they are representative of women taking back their sexuality. I was particularly impressed with a scene after Ava and Dwight have sex wherein Green stands at the window fully nude, entirely on display, while Brolin sits naked on the bedside, a well-placed shadow concealing his junk. Sure, very empowering as if Rodriguez and Miller have the same distaste for penises that Ava has for clothing. Not that I need Brolin flopping around in 3-D, but don’t try and sell me on the idea this film is something it clearly isn’t… unless Rosario Dawson walking around with a mask she could have borrowed from the Gimp in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a metaphor for something I’m ignorantly missing.
A Dame to Kill For is ultimately it’s own worst enemy. For all the creative kills it employs — head smashing, eye-gouging, arrows, samurai swords, broken fingers, etc. — after the first few they all blend together. The umph is lost in the reductive repetition, one bludgeoning scene after another.
The use of voice over isn’t helping any either as every muscle twitch and smell is relayed to the audience as if we’re stuck in the panels of Frank Miller’s graphic novels. It’s one thing to bring a graphic novel to life, it’s another to forget you’re making a movie and not a motion comic. Let the images relay the details, not the characters. The film’s visual design is emblematic of this issue as all detail is lost in the glossy presentation Miller and Rodriguez rely on narration to put the audience in the right frame of mind, as if a film made up entirely of villains wasn’t enough.
I can’t say the film is all bad, however. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a great performance, the last scene we see him in was probably the only moments in the film I felt anything when it came to this rash of one-note characters. I guess Eva Green was convincing in what amounts to her latest role as a snarling siren, but I think I was more convinced how comfortable she is being naked on screen than anything else.
In the end, Rodriguez and Miller have opted to go the easy route and instead of bringing us into Sin City they keep it at a distance, using voice over to tell us what it’s like rather than allowing us to experience it for ourselves. Instead all we experience is one reason or another to go from one punch to the next breast. Had they chosen to drop the idea of four subpar narratives and stuck to one good one (the Gordon-Levitt one preferably) this could have been a much greater movie. Instead A Dame to Kill For is another bland dish cooked together with a tired recipe.
