What
was once a groundbreaking visual experiment to try to recreate on the
silver screen the look and feel of a ultra-stylized, hard-boiled Frank
Miller comic is now just more of the same. In the intervening
years, we've seen Miller's 300 get
adapted in an equally green-screened style similar to that comic
(including its sequel), and Miller himself tried his hand at directing
a movie in the Sin City style in
his god-awful superhero throwback, The
Spirit. But that probably won't displease fans of Miller and
his "Sin City" mini-series of comic books from enjoying this return to
the dark and violent world of noir that he created in the 1990s,
especially as it adds a couple of never-before-seen tales to the mix.
Again, we have a mostly starkly shaded black-&-white world of sleaze
and vice, with occasional eye-popping elements of color, with
characters who are gross exaggerations of noir archetypes in their
personalities and physical abilities. It still favors style over
substance to the utmost degree, but the style is still very
impressive, even if we've seen it before. I suppose the one key
difference is that it is shot for 3D (no, not post-converted), which
makes those pop-out visuals really stand out.
There are three story threads to A
Dame to Kill For
(or four, if you count one minor one with
Marv (Rourke,
Immortals), including the adaptation of
the mini-series from which it draws its title. In this prequel
tale, we see Josh Brolin (Guardians
of the Galaxy, Oldboy) take over
a role that was played by Clive Owen in the original, as Dwight.
Dwight falls for femme fatale Ava Lord (Green,
300: Rise of an Empire), who is stuck
in an abusive marriage with her domineering husband (Csokas,
The Amazing Spider-Man 2).
A large side story involves Johnny (Gordon-Levitt,
The Wind Rises), an arrogant gambler
who can seemingly never lose, who walks into the poker room run by the
powerful and corrupt Senator Roark (Boothe,
MacGruber), only to find that you
can win the poker hand, but lose your physical hand in the process if
you show up the most powerful figure in Basin City. And Roark better
watch out because the third story sees stripper Nancy Callahan (Alba,
Machete Kills) out for
revenge on him for the murder of her beloved John Hartigan (Willis,
Red 2), who she continues to see in
either spirit or hallucination form.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For doesn't crackle with the same
excitement as the original Sin City, but that's likely the
result of it coming out so much later, when everyone but the most
stalwart of fans have given up caring about a follow-up. Had
this come out in 2007, the same year as 300, we'd have a bit
more excitement, even if it is more of the same by its very nature.
Though they are obviously cut from the same
cloth, A Dame to Kill For is a step down, not just because
seeing the same style is increasingly stale to the viewer, but because
it is a bit more uneven in its approach.
That it's redundant of the first film is something to be expected from
just about any sequel; that it's redundant even within itself is not.
How many times will we see someone fall out of a window? How
many different characters will injure an eye? How many different
characters will use a crossbow as a weapon? How many people will
we see behind the wheel of a convertible driving down the cliffside?
How many faces are going to be cut up with scabs and scars?
Much of the reason for the redundancy is slavish adherence to the
source material from Frank Miller, who gets a co-director credit this
time out (director Rodriguez (Machete,
Grindhouse) lobbied furiously for
this to occur on the first film). "Sin City", the comic, despite
its old Hollywood influence, was never crafted to be a movie, telling
several separate tales of life in Basin City for a variety of
archetypical characters. He could afford to be redundant in
themes because the readers for any given piece might be entirely
different than the others, and readers only got chunks of it at a time,
waiting months for the entire story to play out.
Here, the stories are all mashed together, and in seeing them play
out all at once, we can see that Miller tends to explore many of the same story
beats over and over again. Perhaps it's a weakness of Miller,
whose creative skills have been criticized for going steadily downhill in
quality over the past decade, or perhaps it is a signature style.
Whatever the case, as a movie, it doesn't work quite the same way
since what happens to one character happened to another fifteen
minutes before, then another 20 minutes after. When it feels
like a story is going in circles, a growing tedium sets in. Despite
clocking in a good 15 minutes shorter than its predecessor, it does
feel more on the long side.
While I think that film critics can be a bit harsh to seeing a
property
they saw a decade before and grow restless when something new isn't
being presented, I do think that the reputation of A Dame to Kill
For will increase somewhat as time goes on, and fresh people
who've never seen either film watch them in close succession, and not
take into account the length of span between chapters. It really
does capture the Miller comics quite well, and it does fit in closely,
despite some actor changes, with the spirit of the original film.
The thrill of seeing a wholly unique style in cinema may be forever
gone, but to those who actually like this story and this style, you're
getting your money's worth. A Dame to Kill For may be
flawed, and it might feel like we're getting Sin City's
leftovers, but it still holds a certain
fascination for a genre exploration that is rather unique in the world
of comic-based films. This prequel/sequel isn't
worth killing for, but if you're a huge fan of the first chapter, it
is still worth a look to catch up with Frank Miller's crazy, Eisner-award winning
world of wacked-out characters.
