Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Directors: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Josh Brolin
Two stars
After being clunked over the head in 1944's Murder, My Sweet, Raymond Chandler's immortal private eye Philip Marlowe wryly narrated the experience of being knocked out: "A black pool opened up at my feet. I jumped in."
In Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a belated, 3-D sequel to 2005's Sin City, the cultishly adored graphic novelist Frank Miller and the genre-exploiting director Robert Rodriguez have again jumped right into the same dark abyss into which Dick Powell's Marlowe fell, the same noir sea – or, at least, some hyper-stylised version of it. Both Sin City movies are double layers of aesthetic idolatry: Miller, famed for his Dark Knight Returns reimagining of Batman, worships at the pulp altar of Chandler and Mickey Spillane while Rodriguez is slavishly devoted to turning Miller's two-dimensional drawings into cinematic flesh. They each approach their tasks with gusto that can only be admired, even if the results can't.
Like its predecessor, A Dame to Kill For was made with an almost entirely digital palette, placing the actors Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin and Eva Green on a starkly black-and-white canvas in a fictional (but very Los Angeles-like) permanent-midnight metropolis of rampant crime, extreme brutality and raunchy luridness. Stitched together are a grotesque handful of overlapping revenge tales carried out by thin stereotypes: an exotic dancer (Alba) bent on killing a corrupt politician (the magnetic Powers Boothe); a pained loner (Brolin) caught in the spell of a Medusa-like femme fatale (Green, her green eyes aflame); a gambler (Gordon-Levitt) aiming, at the poker table, to humble the father (Boothe again) who abandoned him. Rourke, with an exaggerated rock of a face and a trench coat for a cape, is a kind of overseer and enforcer.
As an exercise in stylistic verisimilitude, the two Sin City films are at least interesting, innovative footnotes in two of the most widespread trends in movies: digital filmmaking and comic-book adaptations. In a movie world now so devoted to comics, Sin City tries like nothing else to faithfully transfer to the big screen the experience of reading one. But, in the end, the filmmakers only highlight that such a union of media can lead down an empty rabbit hole.
Marlowe got out of his black pool. Miller just keeps falling deeper into it.
• Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is out in cinemas today
* AP
