Director Robert Rodriguez' hard-boiled anthology feature Sin City was released nine years ago, but it remains his most distinctive and innovative work. Adapted from co-director Frank Miller's comics, the film unfolds in a gritty, grimy metropolis that's juiced up and ugly as hell. Digitally painted in black, white, and silvery shadow (with the occasional splash of color) Sin City is like a lurid detective paperback filtered through a horny adolescent's imagination. Now Rodriguez and Miller have reunited to deliver three new stories (and one meaty intro) set in this freakish noir purgatory.
Like its predecessor, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For flits between multiple tales of greed, lust, and murder, with each story connected at the margins to the others. The protagonists in Dame’s trilogy are worn-down exotic dancer Nancy (Jessica Alba), rageaholic private dick Dwight (Josh Brolin), and suave gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Their tales are intertwined with the first Sin City, although the exact chronology gets a bit snarled. (“Wait—isn’t he dead?”) No matter: Dame is sustained by its lusty genre enthusiasm and eye-popping visuals. The film cribs slavishly from the aesthetic and compositions of Miller's comics, but it nonetheless feels gleefully cinematic.
Dame is unexpectedly fresh, visually speaking, boasting a slew of ingenious (and often subtle) digital effects that enrich the series' already unique look. The film's primary flaw is that its dramatic heft and winking callbacks feel too dependent on the first Sin City. Consequently, the new film’s chapters lose some of the bite-sized, standalone character that make the prior film's sequences so satisfying to revisit in isolation. That gripe aside, however, Dame serves up all the blood, breasts, and bullets that anyone could ask for—and in Sin City, that's all anyone gets.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For opens in wide release Friday, August 22.
