Stars: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liotta, Christopher Meloni, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Lloyd, Jaime King, Juno Temple | Written by Frank Miller | Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
It was an invite to a screening like any other, or so I thought. You take your ticket, you take your chances. Sometimes everyone goes home with a smile on their faces, sometimes people go to the emergency room… without any face. I heard from the people that know that a sequel to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City was in town. Looking for trouble. Out to bust some heads and blow some minds. Sin City and me, we go way back. We had history. Once we’d been lovers but time had moved us apart. So when this new bozo turns up, A Dame to Kill For, wearing Sin City’s clothes, recasting its stars and acting like it owned the whole joint, me and my buddy had to check it out and if necessary, bust its sweet ass back into place.
A Dame to Kill For takes no chances in being mistaken for anything other than the new Sin City in town. You got your big hard men, doing big hard things on rainy nights, reciting hackneyed monologues and wearing vests and chins and leather trench coats. Always the leather trench coats. Because what is a man without his leather trench coat? He ain’t nuthin’. And nuthin’ll get you chewed up and spat out of this big bad world. So wear your leather trench coat. You also got your broads. Your broads are either hookers or strippers or psychopaths, or all of the above. There ain’t no other way for a woman to be in this world. And if your broads ain’t getting their bazongas out or pushing their 3D tushies in your face for less than 78% of your film’s run time, then your film ain’t worth the light particles its projected on.
You also got your Mickey Rourke. Yeah, Mickey’ll get you outta trouble. Get you in it too, mind. So you got a lotta Mickey. Then you got your Josh Brolin. Brolin’s acting like he’s Clive Owen. This might take you a while to get, if you’re slow. And you can’t be slow in Sin City. Slow is dead. Your Joseph Gordon-Levitt, your Rosario Dawson, your Bruce Willis, your numerous cameos from the stars big and small. All the stars come out at night in Sin City and they all shine as brightly as they can.
A Dame to Kill For ain’t clever. She ain’t gonna change the world. Hell, you’ve seen her before. You’ve seen her in 2005 and she ain’t changed a bit. She’s still kind of cheesy. She’s still a check list of hard-boiled noir clichés, from the stripper with the heart of gold, to every booze-filled scene and every gun-toting set piece. She’s still got the gender politics of a medieval frat party. Yet goddamn it if there ain’t some pretty violence in there. No one does a decapitation like this broad. No one makes a blood splatter look like you could hang it in MoMA. She might be in 3D now and the only things that look good in 3D are smoke and precipitation but goddamn it if there ain’t a hell of a lot of smoke and precipitation in the film. You seen these black and white CGI, comic book stylisations before, but you like lookin’ at them. And they like lookin’ at you. Cause that’s all this broad wants – she wants you to look at her while she shows you what she’s got. No promises, no commitments. You may not like it all. Hell, it may annoy you, make you want to pick up your guns and take down the slimy scumballs that ushered this filth into this poor excuse for hell that we call the world and stand on a rooftop in the rain nursing your firearm whilst explaining to no one in tones as grizzled as your war wounds about how your life is hard, but that’s how you like it. But it’s beautiful filth. And she doesn’t outstay her welcome this time. Somehow, you know she’ll be back for more trouble.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is released across the UK from August 25th.
*** 3/5