Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb / Wiki / Letterboxd

[Henry Gale]

Finally, some more adventures from Miller's feverish world of broken opulence where slaughter-infected debauchery and depravity is seemingly its only export or daily activity!

As a film, the way it takes on more or less the exact same structure as the first with stories that don't quite seem to deliver the same all-encompassing atmosphere of gleeful dread and impactfully fresh new visual style is a bit discouraging. Having said that, it's not like it pitfalls into something it shouldn't be. It's still a mostly gloriously, sumptuously, titillatingly visceral hunk of fun (that's also even surprisingly funnier than I think even the first was), even if the impression it leaves is ultimately a shallow one.

The punches, gunshots, cuts and falls sound and feel more intense than in most movies, it's just a shame the people they happen to often feel like glorified props. And in the end it comes down to it feeling a lot more surface level even when it's dealing with the inner turmoil of its main characters, and maybe that's because despite all their monologuing, they're not all that interesting when the things they're doing are being said rather than done, in engaging ways or at all.

The Marv, Dwight and Hartigan/Nancy tales in the 2005 film simply have more urgency both with its stakes and tangible emotions behind them. There, each seems to involve someone immediately being taken hostage or with a expiration date on their life for one reason or another. The stories in A Dame To Kill For, on the other hand, all stem ideas similar to one another, but this time it's its characters struggling with their worst inner impulses or prolonged thirst for revenge that sort of hover above action that doesn't always feel essential to the core thematic backbone of them (if Miller even cares about that sort of thing).

And maybe that's a problem with the source material, or even with the original movie that I admittedly haven't seen since my teen years, but I know that this time it just didn't hit me as hard, and it also doesn't have quite as many strikingly iconographic compositions helping it along the way. (There are some beautiful bits though. And not just when Eva Green's clothing allergies frequently take effect.) Miller's storytelling just feels a lot more hollow with each thread feeling less like it could stand alone to pack their own punches, relying on the others to justify its feature-length. Also, it doesn't have much of an ending, it resolves everything to a point and then just kinda... rolls credits. I guess it kind of makes sense because most of the further journeys (and demises) of so many of the key characters occurred last time around, but something of a tidy and cool denouement would've been nice, even just to halfheartedly bookend Marv's prologue.

But despite the nearly decade since the last one, the cast and the effects all fall pretty seamlessly back into their roles, with only a few different actors in certain roles and the noticable technological improvement (particularly in how it implements and shows off what it can do in its impressive but not overly flashy 3D) with everything and everyone knowing exactly how it needs to function tonally and characteristically.

It's like a band who put out a great album in one era, then went off and did their own things for a while, only to finally reunite with the same lineup to put out new music that captures that exact same sound you loved, only the songs aren't quite as memorable. Going back to Sin City, all the sights are the same, but the itinerary it chooses isn't as enthralling, maybe because it's so similar.

*** / 6.4

[Dukefrukem]

Henry Gale says I would like it, so I will see it.

[Dukefrukem]

Can anyone find the thread where we predicted how well this would do in the boxoffice opening weekend?

[dreamdead]

Can anyone find the thread where we predicted how well this would do in the boxoffice opening weekend?

I don't see any real prognosticating with actual numbers, but here, basically.

[Dukefrukem]

I don't see any real prognosticating with actual numbers, but here, basically.

That's the discussion I was looking for. Thanks.

[Pop Trash]

Can anyone find the thread where we predicted how well this would do in the boxoffice opening weekend?

Remember: if this breaks $100 million domestic, Wats is giving me all his money.

[Pop Trash]

Apparently If I Stay (whatever that is) is predicted to be #1 this weekend so Wats might be off the hook.

[Dukefrukem]

They're projecting Sin City $15 million opening weekeed and GotG $15.1 million . lawl

[Henry Gale]

I'd sadly be impressed if it cracks 10 million at this point. When The Game Stands Tall (whatever that is) will likely do better than it, especially seeing as I kept seeing its ads touting church trip organization sites like Heaven Is F'Real, God Ain't Dead and early Tyler Perry movies did.

I'd say Rodriguez deserves better, but his last two movies were his Spy Kids pseudo reboot and Machete Kills. If people remembered Shorts, they'd hold it against him too.

This is his best since Grindhouse / Planet Terror, but it's also not even close to as assured or effortlessly entertaining as that. Still, it's probably the most entertaining sequel to a Frank Miller adaptation where Eva Green gets naked this year, but I also haven't seen the other. (I feel like all of this is slowly undoing my initial recommendation.)

[TGM]

It's opening night, and I'm sitting in a completely empty theater waiting to see this. Yeah, not expecting the best opening weekend for this. :P

[Watashi]

All your money belongs to me, Poppy.

[Kurosawa Fan]

All your money belongs to me, Poppy.

Hate to break it to you Wats, but Pop Trash owes you nothing. He even pointed this out to you at the time of the bet. It was totally one-sided. He had nothing to lose.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Hate to break it to you Wats, but Pop Trash owes you nothing. He even pointed this out to you at the time of the bet. It was totally one-sided. He had nothing to lose.

Time. He lost precious seconds of his life.

[Watashi]

Hate to break it to you Wats, but Pop Trash owes you nothing. He even pointed this out to you at the time of the bet. It was totally one-sided. He had nothing to lose.

Then he owes me sexual favors.

Lots and lots of sexual favors.

[Pop Trash]

Hate to break it to you Wats, but Pop Trash owes you nothing. He even pointed this out to you at the time of the bet. It was totally one-sided. He had nothing to lose.

Right. It's not a bet, just an offer of charity. It's like the ice bucket challenge. Only instead of freezing cold water, Wats dumps all of his money into my checking account.

[Pop Trash]

Then he owes me sexual favors.

Lots and lots of sexual favors.

[TGM]

This was okay I guess. There was an over-reliance on the Marv character throughout, almost like they didn't have enough confidence in their other characters to carry their stories on their own. And, speaking of Marv, unless I'm just forgetting something from the first movie (which I admittedly haven't seen in a good while, so it's very possible), they never got around to actually explaining the point of the prologue or what happened to him there. I was expecting them to return to that by the end, so when they just completely neglected to address it, it made the ending feel especially abrupt as a result.

As for the stories themselves, the Josh Brolin/Eva Green story is by far the best thing going on here, while JGL's starts off decently enough, but ultimately felt pointless in the end. Jessica Alba's was pretty cool as well, though. Overall, it's a bit more of a mixed bag than I remember the first one being, but I thought it was alright. I suppose I'll give this one a mild yay.

[Pop Trash]

Well this bombed. Estimates are < $10 million for the weekend. Guess your money is safe Wats.

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Show Spoiler

FOR NOW.

]

[Watashi]

If that's you in the Minnie costume, I will take it.

Though I'm more of a Daisy Duck guy.

[Rowland]

The Eva Green hype is justified, whereas the remainder of the film plays like very intermittently inspired but mostly tired B-sides to the original picture. Remember the Mickey Rourke comeback kid narrative that the first Sin City was instrumental in kicking off? His merely serviceable performance here, aided little by mundane material, is disappointing to say the least. And the ending to this thing? Woof.

[Grouchy]

This is marginally all right. Worse than the first film, better than other stuff I guess.

[number8]

Swear to god, I was in a Target recently and the Bluray was on display at the cashier line, and I did a double take, because I completely 100% forgot that this already came out.

[Dukefrukem]

The recasts were sooooo distracting. I can take 1 and maybe 2, but 4? It's a hard pill to swallow. Even Josh Brolin can't pull of the British charm of Clive Owen. Even more distracting things in the film: Eva Green naked for 99% of her screen-time, Rosario Dawson's breast implants.

JGL's story was my favorite, I yayed this for that, but the rest is forgettable and uninteresting.

I changed my mind, I'm naying this.

[dreamdead]

Thanks free weekend of Showtime for allowing me to tape this dreck and not waste a Netflix spot. This is so monotonous and insignificant throughout--hard-boiled voiceovers that bleed into one another and expose the weakness of the worldview throughout. It's been about a decade since I read any of Miller's books, so I don't know if the writing there is as sophomoric and nihilistic there (honestly, the JGL narrative is so, so damn dumb), but I suspect that the wait behind each of the SC volumes allowed the narrative voice to seem fresher, whereas the inundation here just exposes the silliness of the whole enterprise.

Green is the only person able to construct an interesting arc here, and she's dampered by such a silly ending (the femme fatale doesn't anticipate the close embrace that leads to her fatal shooting? please. That trope was overdone in the 1940s). The rest are merely recycled bits.