Sin City: A Dame Worth Waiting For?
Is nine years too long to wait for a sequel?
2005 seems like an eternity ago.
George Bush was into his second term as president. Crash won Best Picture at the Oscars, providing a glimmer of hope that Brendan Frasier would pull a Tom Hanks and make the switch from screwball comedy to serious drama. Green Day dropped American Idiot. And in April 2005, Robert Rodriguez dropped Sin City, a movie that blew me away at first watch with its grit, violence, sex, look, and feel. Two months later Batman Begins would turn everyone’s heads and set the stage for gritty comic-book movies, but Sin City got there first. Its ensemble cast made every work of Frank Miller’s dialog count, and the cinematography—coupled with the decision to screen the film in mostly black and white—made the movie look like a comic book, in a way no other movie had before it.
Fast forward to 2014. Gritty comic-book movies are the flavor of the moment. Movies like 300 and Scott Pilgrim Versus the World have continued the tradition of making movies look like comic books. In 2014, is there room in the comic-book movie pantheon for a Sin City sequel?
Let me say first that nine years shouldn’t be that long—Sin City and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For don’t even register on the Wikipedia page about longest time spans between sequels. It took Meat Loaf longer than nine years to release a sequel to Bat Out of Hell. Nevertheless, the film suffers from its delay to the big screen. While the movie is able to overcome most of its issues, it never quite rises to the quality of its source material. Add in a slow plot and a look/feel that isn’t as unique anymore and the movie ends up as a middling sequel, more Clerks II than Clerks: The Animated Series.
By far, the biggest draw to this movie is its cast. It would have been difficult to reunite the original cast, given many of the actors’ star statuses, and getting the band back together is compounded by losing Michael Clarke Duncan (Manute) and replacing many of the regulars with new actors. Some of the replacements are for secondary characters, such as Jeremy Piven taking over as Bob for Michael Madsen Devon Aoki (Miho) being replaced with Jamie Chung. The biggest change here is Dwight: with Clive Owen now starring in his own TV show, Dwight McCarthy is now played by Josh Brolin.
I’d gladly let this man break my fingers just to hear his velvety voice one…more…time…
For the most part, the new actors live up to the task, especially Dennis Haysbert, who mimics Michael Clarke Duncan with eerie precision. Brolin is also good, and delivers his lines with a deadpan gravitas in a way Owen never did. The returning cast—especially Powers Boothe, whom I could sit and listen to for hours—all make the most of their dialog as well and newcomers Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eva Green fit in like they’ve always lived in Basic City.
The other main concern I have about this movie is its pacing. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is slow. While it isn’t as slow as, say, and indie art-house flick, there isn’t the sense of urgency of the first film. The three stories are also more interconnected than they were in the first film, giving the movie a more coherent plot, but one that sacrifices speed for cohesion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but one of the things I liked about the first Sin City was its kinetic energy and that is sorely missing this go-around.
Ultimately Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a big of a mixed bag: top-notch acting and dialog are offset by a mundane script and slow plot. It’s a nice way to wile away a Saturday afternoon at the movies, but it didn’t succeed at meeting the high standards set by the first Sin City. Given its box-office take (or lack thereof) it looks unlikely there will be more movies in the franchise, which is a shame although it may mean the whole enterprise could move to the smaller screen, where its episodic nature could be better served.
tl;drs
Blank is a blanker version of blank: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a slower-paced redo of the first Sin City.
Screen credits over/under: Under. Your sole screenwriter is Frank Miller, and he delivers with classic lines such as “I may have been born at night, but not last night.”
Recommended if you like: Josh Brolin’s resurgence as an A-list actor.
Better than I expected: Miller gives his cast some great lines to chew on, and the cameo roles make the best use of actors that haven’t gotten enough love lately (Ray Liotta, Christopher Lloyd).
Worse than I hoped: It’s slow. Like really slow. Like making-a-margarita-during-the-exposition slow.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For would work better as a(n): serial TV series; a nice hard response to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.
Verdict: With none of the explosiveness of the first movie, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is above-average, mostly thanks to the strong cast.
