“Sin City: A Dame To Kill For” is set in a nasty town where the men are bare-knuckled and the women are barely clothed. Disputes are settled with shotguns, the authorities are despicable, and bones get smashed like pretzels. It’s almost as bad as a boys’ boarding school.
As conceived by Frank Miller and co-director Robert Rodriguez, all of this comes across in an intensely decorative, digitalized black and white (with sudden stabs of color) that is a glory to behold — and I’m not just talking about the tableau of Eva Green spotlighted nude against a full moon, although I am never going to stop talking about that. From moment to moment, the sequel to 2005’s “Sin City” is beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, all brawl and snarl and hurt. Double-crossing women and pitiless men careen down boulevards of doom, downing booze against the flaming night, and sometimes they totally aren’t even wearing their seatbelts.
Considered overall, though, the movie can be monotone and airless: It’s 100 solid minutes of wearying pastiche, and I found myself checking my watch a lot. Viscerally portrayed as they are, the characters aren’t allowed to step away from being stock types. That means the film delivers only a shrug and not a shock when someone, say, catches a bullet with his forehead.
Miller (who wrote the script based on his own comic book) weaves together three revenge stories about a cocky young chancer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an exotic dancer (Jessica Alba) and a prowling P.I. (Josh Brolin). All three of the protagonists are aided by a hulking hired gun named Marv (Mickey Rourke), who gets restless if he goes more than a day without breaking a skull or two. Marv wears a blocky molding of scar tissue that’s so disturbing it may remind you of Rourke’s actual face.
The detective (played by Clive Owen in the first film) gets involved with a duplicitous, clothing-optional femme fatale (Green) who has a curious relationship with her huge chauffeur (Dennis Haysbert), while the other two tangle with the corrupt, poker-playing senator (Powers Boothe) who killed the dancer’s protector (Bruce Willis, back in ghost mode) in the first film. Everyone speaks in a hard-boiled idiom that’s almost as much fun as the visuals: “A city’s like a woman or a casino: Somebody’s gonna win.”
The earlier “Sin City” had the value of novelty, and though the second is a bit more streamlined it arrives far too late to seem fresh. Still, Miller’s commitment to this world is thrillingly palpable: Though the film is an exaggerated parody of 1940s noirs, it doesn’t deflate itself with joking or camp attitude.
Your reaction will depend on how seriously you can take a movie in which hookers (one dressed as Zorro) defend their turf with crossbows, yet to Miller the saucy dolls and tough guys who know the score are all part of the same, fully realized ecosystem of iniquity. Soaking up the wickedness makes for an excellent diversion, for a while. Sin City is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.