Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

Should you make a sequel after the original came out 10 years earlier? When the original movie got rave reviews and it has characters which are widely loved it seems like a nobrainer. The result doesn’t always work though. The original Star Wars trilogy was adored, but the three new films disappointed many. A Dame to Kill For is the sequel to the Sin City movie from 2005. Should this movie have been made?

I thought the original movie was very good (I never reviewed it, but it received top marks). The style was unique, making it look like a comic book brought to life. Director Robert Rodriguez managed (together with its creator Frank Miller) to use new techniques and a colours in a unique way to create a memorable movie. The story was very violent, but with memorable characters like Marv (Mickey Rourke), Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl), Hartigan (Bruce Willis) and Kevin (Elijah Wood), together with very dark humour, it was a movie which left an impression.

And now there is the sequel. The movie assumes you still know the characters, but after so many years I recognised their faces but had forgotten what had happened to them. The movie tries to give some information about it, but for many viewers this won’t be sufficient. The “Dame to Kill For” in this case is Ava (Eva Green). A femme fatale who uses men to reach her own goals. Just like the original movie this film tells a couple of separate stories. One of them is about Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is a gambler who meets the wrong man and has to face the consequences of that. Although the story seems interesting initially, the ending wasn’t satisfying. It isn’t the only story where that’s the case as I had that feeling for most of the film.

There are a couple reasons for that. The style, which felt so fresh in 2005, still looks beautiful but here it seems to have only been used to make it look good without there being any content underneath. The dialogue is often laughable and the constant voiceovers start to bore quickly (I don’t know how many times you get to hear how it felt to be hit by someone). In the original character Marv was one of the highlights, but here he simply doesn’t have the same charisma (and his makeup also doesn’t look as good). Jessica Alba plays her role of stripper Nancy again, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. When Eva Green bares it all and everything in the movie is about sex then the couple of dances she does feel extremely tame. Her story doesn’t kick into gear until the last part of the movie, but wasn’t too interesting. The highlight is Eva Green, who acts great, but it isn’t enough to save the movie. I had high expectations, but these unfortunately weren’t met. The style of the original is still there, but the heart has disappeared.