Sin City: A Dame to Kill For ***
Dirs: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez. With:
Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin. 102 mins. Cert: 18
Frank Miller and
Robert Rodriguez’s noir-inflected portmanteau Sin City offered a storehouse of lustrous CG imagery to global ad
agencies, so it’s surprising how much of this follow-up – technically a
prologue, reviving several characters who met their makers in 2005 – still
looks fresh, each frame now adorned with Rodriguez’s typically playful 3D. The
weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns, populated in
a couple of instances – Josh Brolin for Clive Owen, Jamie Chung for Devon Aoki
– by second-choice faces. Two out of its three tales prove snappy enough:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is nicely spry as a gambler crossing the wrong guy, while
a pay-off finally rescues Jessica Alba from bland gyration. Only with the
centrepiece, a torturous quadruple indemnity with the reliably bosomy Eva Green
luring middle-aged masochists to their doom, does the pulp become punitive and
hard to swallow. The vision remains uncompromising, however, and it dazzles far
more than any sequel should.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For opens in London's West End today, then in cinemas nationwide from Monday.
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