Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
Yesterday’s Unsatisfactory Comic-Book Movie sequel was Kick-Ass 2. The next comic-book movie sequel that was a disappointment was Sin City: A Dame To Kill For – I can understand why it ended up on Netflix, like Kick-Ass 2 (Netflix UK does not get the best choice of films).
Unlike Kick-Ass 2, Sin City 2 has the same writer/director team as the first film; like Kick-Ass 2, it uses comic books as the source material, additional Sin City storylines from Frank Miller’s catalogue (plus two original stories he wrote for the film) as the basis of the film; another similarity is that Sin City 2 includes most of the original cast (including interesting new faces such as Christopher Lloyd and Ray Liotta). Yet another similarity is that I enjoyed the first film (see my thoughts on Sin City), which is another reason why the sequel felt even worse. Like Kick-Ass 2, Sin City 2 is not a good film in its own right and not a good sequel to the first film made nine years previously.
The first Sin City film was ridiculously violent, highly stylised, with a colour palette derived from the comic books and (at the time) a unique look, and it had a freshness, a vitality, a distinctive tone; the sequel is leaden, scattershot, pedestrian, a faded copy, the stories coming across as footnotes to the stories in the first film. I couldn’t believe that the sequel was made by the same creative team, who seemed to be genuinely making a proper Sin City film instead of some sort of parody film. As I said in my tweet, the last line of the film summed up the viewing experience: ‘It soils everybody.’
The first film managed a balance between the ‘realism’ of the setting with over-the top action, the verging-on-pastiche dialogue, the rather bleak view of women, and some clichéd aspects of hard-boiled fiction. The sequel decided to forget to bother with that and just go balls-out for unbelievable action – a young girl slicing off the heads of disposable gangsters while jumping impossibly high in the air; people standing across a courtyard from each other and firing machine guns and somehow surviving – and force terrible parodying dialogue in the mouths of good actors. It made me feel sad for people I like when they appeared in the film – poor returning Rosario Dawson, poor newcomer Joseph Gordon Levitt; the only person who comes out of it with dignity is Eva Green, a terrific actor who manages to generate the right insane intensity for the role within the movie so you can’t take your eyes off her.
Frank Miller’s comic-book work was entering into self-parody by the time he was only doing Sin City work (which was around the time I stopped buying any Miller comics), and it has a been a long time since he was a vital contributor to the form (the Dark Knight Returns sequel was hideous, and I’m not looking for the upcoming third instalment), so it’s unsurprising that this sequel feels uninspired. The film also suffers because Miller’s own directorial debut, the dire film adaptation of The Spirit (or, rather, Frank Miller does The Spirit as Sin City, completely missing the point), which destroyed a lot of affection for the Sin City film style by using the Sin City style inappropriately and making a truly horrible film (as I tried to encapsulate in my blog post about it).
Another thing: Robert Rodriguez hasn’t made a film as good as Sin City since, seemingly regressing to making films that are cinematic releases but look and feel as if they should have been released straight to video (and yes, I deliberately used the word ‘video’ because that’s how archaic they feel); this leads to a lack of strong directorial vision in charge of this sequel that nobody was clamouring for anymore. The only positive is that the film did not do well theatrically, so at least it brought us the possibility of no more Sin City films and, even better, no more films by Frank Miller.
Come back tomorrow for the final Unsatisfying Comic-Book Movie Sequel.
