Review: Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

2005 saw the first Sin City released. Its  became one of the biggest surprise hits in film of the last decade. The big positives that came out of it was the feeling of the pages literally leaping onto the screen, the old school noir feel to it, the visuals and the level of detail the director and his team did to make sure he remained loyal to the source material and the style of presentation.

Sadly, this nine year wait could well be A Dame To Kill For's downfall. This is by no means a bad or boring movie. But I think we all knew this was never going to surpass or even match its predecessor. A film with such uniqueness and novelty could never match the expectations, it was pretty much inevitable. You see that with many films e.g. The Matrix.

From the very first scene, I instantly kept remembering how enjoyable the first one was. I did not really want to do that, but the opening story did not engage me enough. I was also distracted by unnecessary changes to a certain character which annoyed me.
Thankfully, we got introduced to a new character and an underused one from the previous film. This is where I started to get a bit more interested into what the new Sin City installment could actually do now. As the blood, violence and film-noir tone romped along, I was feeling about more comfortable with this sequel. But I'm afraid the novelty is starting to ware off which I think many will expect and this was looking like to be solid and nothing more.
After a pretty sudden ending to an reasonably entertaining finale, I was having mixed feelings.

Let's start with the positives. The visuals are still pleasing to the eye. The best performances are by the slick Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the amazingly villainous Powers Boothe and the striking Eva Green. There are also some great set-pieces, mainly involving Jessica Alba which was pleasing to the eye.

As for the negatives, its biggest one is its lack of charactersation, the generally underwhelming stories and no iconic moments that will crop up in your head weeks after seeing it.
One character that felt less edgy and a bit detached from the film was Josh Brolin's performance as Dwight. With Clive Owen playing the role in 2005, his performance felt far superior to Brolin which is hard to believe from their previous work. Another performance that seemed to lack was Rourke as Marv. After stealing the show in 2005, he seemed to be a pastiche of himself.

In the end, I felt there were positives such as the interesting new characters, strong visuals, nice set-pieces and a continuing great modern homage to film-noir. But there was disappointing moments, the stories did not feel as engaging, the pacing did not feel as smooth as the first one, some of the returning characters did not develop well, the ending was quite abrupt and it felt a bit over-digitalised.
I was forced to see it in 3D, as I did not have time to find a 2D screening. It is actually a surprising use of 3D which I did think would happen. It did enhance that graphic novel tone which was nice to see, and fair play to the makers for making great use of this technology.
It is reasonably enjoyable, but I think throughout the film you would be thinking how good the first Sin City was and still is. But I am hoping over time that people will ignore the gap in releases and watch it back-to-back and that could make it look better.

Rating: 7/10