Cinemavenger

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Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

The official title of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is the John Holmes-ian mouthful, Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - though the only places you'll find it written that way are on the movie poster and in Miller's diary . . . over and over with little hearts and "Frank rules!" drawn all around. How tiny must his cock be that, after all of his successes in comics (sorry nerds, "graphic novels") and movies, he still feels the need to topline the title of his Sin City sequel? I'm guessing somewhere between girls-pointing-and-laughing and needing-an-electron-microscope-just-to-find-the-damn-thing.

After the dollars rolled in for the 2005 original, it was inevitable that the brothers Weinstein would reach their greedy little hands back into audience's pockets with another trip to Sin City.  I guess they were just too busy riding their gold plated polo ponies and monocle shopping for the past nine years to be bothered with it until now.

Both the original and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For  feature Jessica Alba as a stripper.  The fact that Alba, a notorious prude with a chastity-belted No Nudity clause, has been cast as a gin mill ecdysiast not once but twice is a Zen koan of fucktardedness.  Any Hollywood hack who puts a non-stripping stripper on screen should immediately be flown coach to Detroit, N'awlins or, these days, Ferguson, Missouri and forced to walk through the most "urban" part of town wearing a Die Hard With a Vengeance-style sandwich board.  I mean, seriously, how do you fuck up casting a stripper?  Pretty much the only requirement is visible titties!

Then again, playing a peeler who doesn't peel goes right along with Alba being an actress who can't act.  But unlike the first movie, when all she was asked to do was stand around looking pretty, here she's tasked with conveying actual emotions in a haunted tough chick role.  The only thing less believable than Alba as a tough chick is her weapon of choice, a semi-automatic crossbow with a limitless supply of magically appearing arrows.  Would that we had a time machine and could have brought back a young Angelina Jolie to play the part.  She'd've been buck-ass naked and dual-wielding a couple of MAC-10s like she was born to it before the director yelled "Action!"

Speaking of brain damaged casting, in Sin City Clive Owen played Dwight McCarthy.  In Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Josh Brolin takes his place.  Changing the face of the character is no big deal.  After all, that's kind of his thing.  But since when does reconstructive plastic surgery give an American guy a British accent?  Eh, guv'ner?  

Oh, and you may have appeared alongside Biehn and Sheen in Navy Seals and been the President on 24, but Dennis "Allstate Shill" Haysbert, you sir are no Michael Clarke Duncan.  Each time you show up as Manute, all I can think of is that you're about to pitch me some car insurance.

And don't get me started on how they treat Eva Green as the titular dame for whom someone would kill.  The Weinsteins must have been trying to save every shekel they could on wardrobe, because aside from a blue raincoat in one scene and a see-through nightgown in another, the poor dear is naked every time she's on camera.  All you gay guys out there who were planning to flock to Sin City: A Dame to Kill For like it was Pride Week in Provincetown, you've been warned.

Directors Miller and Rodriguez apparently fear change more than a cuprolaminophobic.  Boasting the same hyper-stylized black and white with the occasional dash of color thrown in to break up the monotony, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a high-tech mimeograph of Sin City.  And you know what that means.  All the great, gleaming gouts of white blood splashing through the air once again look like so much CG bird shit.  But I'm sure that's what they were going for.

August 24, 2014