Sin City 2 - A Dame To Kill For - Bristol film review - Certificate 18
Posted on: 2014-09-04
Our rating:
Sin City 2 brilliantly does what any good sequel should do, taking old and new characters and expanding the mythology of its brutal universe with dynamic character licks, great story-telling, palpable grittiness, and oodles and oodles of style.
If there's one thing you can't accuse Robert Rodriguez of being, it's lazy. As with all of his previous pictures, he applies his maverick jack-of-all-trade skills here to perform duties as co-director, cinematographer and editor, as well as penning some of the musical score.
It's been a while since the last Sin City flick - 2005, in fact - and it's taken almost a decade to get the second instalment made due to negotiating the budget and getting the cast together. Pretty surprising when you consider the original was a big hit, but who can ever fathom the logic of Hollywood's money men?
Author of the original graphic novels, Frank Miller, is this time on hand to help Rodriguez direct, and the format of Sin City 2 pretty much follows the same structure as its predecessor, here splicing narrative elements from two stories, The Long Bad Night and The Fat Loss.
So we have more of the same, though significantly amped-up visual flair and pyrotechnics of a brooding, noirish Basin City of dark, violent and tortured souls, lashing digital rain, the odd splash of colour, and plenty of bad-ass, pouting, manipulative femme fatales.
Standout vamp on the female roster here is Eva Green, an actress loving every minute as she chews men up and spits them out with serpentine ferocity.
Clive Owen doesn't feature this time and is instead replaced by an excellent Josh Brolin as Dwight McCarthy, encapsulating the personal suffering, loneliness, and anguished desperation of a world that seems determined to grind him into the ground. Joseph Gordon-Lovett gets most of the brutal punishment, however, as Johnny - face smashed, fingers broken, pumped with bullets, left for dead - a cocky gambler who ends up losing everything.
Amidst all the monochrome mayhem are a few familiar faces: Mickey Rourke as Marv, growling, bone-crushing, popping whole heads like grapes; and Jessica Alba as Nancy, this time more tortured, broken and damaged on a self-destructive, Vodka-addled mission to wipe out the smugly omnipotent Senator Rourke, played by Powers Booth in truly menacing, sadistic form.
Ray Liotta and Lady Gaga have cameos, as does Doc Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd, as a boozy surgeon with dubious medical skills.
As with the original, this is a seething, festering hellhole of a city where the women get a tough call and the men get much worse, and there's no question that it's a visually stunning slice of comic book menace and the narration, despite occasionally slipping from the hard-boiled world-weariness of Mickey Spillane to overwrought hokum, still fits the noirish world like a glove.
It's a sequel, then, that brilliantly does what any good sequel should do, taking old and new characters and expanding the mythology of its brutal universe with dynamic character licks, great story-telling, palpable grittiness, and oodles and oodles of style.
4/5
Reviewed by Jamie Caddick for 365Bristol
Article by:
Born and raised in the suburbs of Swansea, Jimmy moved to Bristol back in 2004 to attend university. Passionate about live music, sport, science and nature, he can usually be found walking his cocker spaniel Baxter at any number of green spots around the city. Call James on 078 9999 3534 or email Editor@365Bristol.com.
