Directed by: Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez
Written by: Frank Miller
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson
Rating: [2.5/5]
Revisiting the world where debauchery reigns appears as a good idea giving the opportunity to explore even more characters and their stories. Something good on the surface but with the narrative choices undertaken in this feature, it leaves for far more head-scratching than what the visual style can compensate thus leaving a mixed bag of a sequel with a bevy of problems.
Following the negative impact of Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) on the citizens of the city, many take aim at him. There’s Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who gets brutally beaten after humiliating the powerful man in a game of poker as well as Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), who swears vengeance after Roark caused officer Hartigan to kill himself.
When operating with the good grace of a novel idea, you need to make the most of it, which the first Sin City used to its advantage. Sure, that feature struggled with its own narrative issues but it did just enough in conjunction with its visually striking elements to deliver a really good movie. A Dame to Kill For cannot say the same when looking at the direction the feature goes in subjecting itself to the apt label of style over substance. Similarly to the first feature, this overall story consists of an anthology of different ones that have even more of a narrative cohesion between them as you get characters from each one converging together with all pretty much having something out against Senator Roark. This presents an opportunity for more of a team-up for these characters even if it renders worse results.
As the subtitle indicates, this narrative contains a femme fatale who evidently proves worthy to be fought over and Eva Green’s Ava Lord does just that. Green steps into this role and helps create this incredibly alluring and seductive woman who knows how to utilize all of her talents to make men do all of her dirty work for her. She stands in as one of the villains along with Roark and keeps us lured into her trap much like the other men in the feature as we try to decipher exactly what serves as her endgame at the end of all of this. Green certainly appears as the best new addition to the cast as she portrays a woman who finds her own way to obtain power through this world without having the skill of physical violence like the sex workers in Old Town, which allows for a larger discussion on how women get treated in this story.
The first feature had its fair share of women dying, but the manner in which A Dame to Kill For carries out its constant execution of these characters to an exploitative degree does begin to raise some red flags. This criticism does not mean women characters should not be killed in stories, but it begins to build this sense of one-dimensionality in the stories told by Frank Miller, who also co-directed the feature. A sense of gratuitousness begins to become more apparent when looking at how these women die and more importantly what purpose it ultimately serves the male characters in the story. Something not necessarily clear in the first feature but when we get inundated with another wave of it in this follow up it demonstrates a trend and a tiring one that. You could just guess any female character would get shelved while receiving much of nothing to do other than Eva Green as their only purpose serves to motivate one man to kill another.
Evidently, this tiredness also translated into the box office where it failed to recover only half of the production budget, and with good reason. This feature contains the same striking visual style but the manner in which it struggles to keep the narrative fresh even with the addition of someone as alluring and sensational as Eva Green leaves this feature flailing to make something worth engaging with. The visuals, thus remain the only thing keeping us with the movie as a whole, which after a while does not wow us in the same way. Delving into another trip into this city also begins to show the warts of the writing involved and that perhaps Frank Miller has a deeply embedded issue with women he has decided to hash out in these stories.
Films with Josh 
