Courtesy The Weinstein Company
A lot can change in nine years. In the near decade that’s passed since director Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller brought Miller’s noir comic Sin City to the big screen, filmmaking technology has gotten better, comic book movies have become an official Big Deal, and 3-D has become a lot more palatable. What’s more surprising is that my ability to watch women being hit (or, to use the local parlance, watching dames get roughed up) has withered from Minimal to None. There were only a few moments when I enjoyed Sin City: A Dame to Kill For—but even then, I felt pretty bad about it.
Look, I get it. Sin City is about very bad people living in a very bad town. It’s escapism to a world in more disarray than our own; there are no heroes, and this isn’t Captain America. So yes, if you like gritty noir, problem drinking, car chases, awesome action, heavy bloodshed, and movies that look like comic books come to beautiful life, and you can handle some stereotypes and watching women get treated poorly—this movie is for you. If not, forget it. (Also, if you’ve been joining the chorus for more and better roles for women in comic-book/action movies, this might have you questioning what you wish for—but more on that later.)
A Dame to Kill For, in theaters today, opens on the same monochromatic Basin City you remember from 2005. Though this time around, probably thanks to even better computer-aided greenscreen tech, the images pop a little more strongly, and the simple color palette makes the 3-D legitimately great. Marv (Mickey Rourke, still giving it his all under all those face prosthetics) is going after some some frat-boy types who had harassed a man on the street. Naturally, they get dealt with. But as in the original Sin City, this is just a vignette to get you in the mood, a standalone story to remind you that Marv is still a loose cannon doling out justice (he got the electric chair in the last movie, but Dame‘s jump-around timeline means he’s alive and well here).
Marv is also the through-line to Rodriguez and Miller’s other stories. He’s at Kadie’s the night that card sharp Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, pulling out his best wise guy) beats Senator Roark (a bone-chilling Powers Boothe) at poker, only to lose in every other way possible. He’s also around as Nancy (Jessica Alba, even more fallen-angel than she was in 2005) plots revenge for the suicide death of Hartigan (Bruce Willis, pulling his best ghost acting out of the closet), who saved her from rape and death at the hands of Roark’s son Yellow Bastard. And, most centrally, Marv is there to help out his old friend Dwight (Josh Brolin, ably taking over for Clive Owen), who gets sucked back into the world of Ava Lord (Green, the titular “dame to kill for”). Over the course of the film’s 102 minutes, all of these loosely intertwining plots resolve themselves in bloody ways.
Eva Green as Ava Lord. Courtesy The Weinstein Company
As with 2005′s Sin, the look is visually compelling and gorgeous. No one before or since Rodriguez has managed to make a film look more like a comic book come to life (as opposed to just a live-action adaptation) while also keeping the excitement of flipping its pages. He pulls off a similar feat here, but—like Johnny doing a one-handed card shuffle a with his left hand while cracking “I’m ambidextrous”—it ends up feeling like the same old trick. Fans of the first film will likely enjoy A Dame to Kill For for more scenes of Gail Running Old Town or Miho Slicing People or Nancy Dancing, but may be disappointed when those things become rote.
The thing that never seems perfunctory is Green, who would win the Oscar for Gracefully Acting Her Way Through a Lot of Bullshit, if there was such a thing. Ava Lord, a former lover of Dwight’s who pulls him (and Marv) into her web with tales of mistreatment by her husband and his man Manute (Dennis Haysbert, taking over for Michael Clarke Duncan), has always been a twisted character, and here she does much of the same manipulating she did in Miller’s book: lying to Dwight and seducing cops to get what she wants. Green goes all in on the role, and as one reviewer has already noted, her performance here sees her “claim membership in the pantheon of film noir leading ladies alongside Jane Greer, Gloria Grahame, Marie Windsor, Peggy Cummings, Lizabeth Scott…” She’s mesmerizing to watch. It’s just unfortunate that she has to be so compelling while making false rape accusations, while getting knocked across a room, and while kissing the man who did it. (Dwight has a skill for that, apparently—he did the same thing with Gail in the first Sin City.) It’s disheartening and she deserves better.
Which brings us back to the women of Basin City. Yes, there are amazing femmes fatales—Rosario Dawson as Gail, Jamie Chung (in for Devon Aoki) as the samurai assassin Miho, and Alba’s Nancy all give as good as they get. But there are also women handcuffed to beds and threatened with death, women called “skank,” women tortured by men who are trying to honor their son’s memories (if you know the first Sin City you know what this means). These things are all true to Miller’s original work, and readers of the comics know they are coming, but in a movie with so many great female actresses, it’s just unfortunate so few of them actually get much respect on screen.
Any of them could take a true heroine character and make her amazing. And in a climate where the conversation has turned to “When will we get a female-lead comic book flick?” it’s disappointing to see a comic-book movie with a lot of strong female performers…who all too often get treated like shit. Sure, Nancy may go all Katniss-with-a-crossbow at one point, but A Dame to Kill For far too often confuses women with weapons for women who are empowered. And no matter how strong Nancy is, the air gets sucked out of the room when Marv, the closest thing to a Lancelot here, watches her pull the trigger and says, “I hope you don’t mind me sayin’ this—you look hot.” (It’s only right to point out that the men of Sin City aren’t rendered very three-dimensionally, either. Mostly they’re just on a mission to out-man each other in all the usual alpha ways.)
Honestly, it’s probably wrong to expect more—all gratuitous everything is the Rodriguez/Miller brand to the core. Sin City stories aren’t meant to be deep, and aren’t here to be politically correct. That’s fine. A lot of un-PC material can be compelling, but what was compelling when Rodriguez and Miller released their first flick in 2005 gets little more than a re-tread here, and a lot has changed since then. As a cinematic venture, A Dame to Kill For is a perfectly fine Sin City adaptation, but Miller and Rodriguez are releasing this film in a time much different than when its predecessor—let alone its source material—were released. After nine years, it’s a shame they haven’t matured.
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