Calling the original Sin City (based on a comic written by Frank Miller) one of my favourite movies is a bit of an understatement. I loved the style it was filmed in, the stories it told and the whole "bad people doing bad things for good reasons" vibe from all the stories. So to call the latest instalment of Sin City- A Dame to Kill For (from now on called Dame) underwhelming would also be an understatement.
Dame is set in the same style as the original, telling 3 (or maybe 4, I am struggling to remember) separate stories that are kind-of interwoven. There is the titular Dame story, the story about a gambler trying to win big against a congressman, and a sequel story about Jessica Alba also getting revenge against the congressman who killed Bruce Willis in the first movie. Some of these are prequel stories to the original movie as well, just to try to keep riding on the coat-tails of a better movie.
The immediate problem Dame has is how much the sequel feels like it has condensed the world. Instead of telling 3 unique stories that might have passing tie-ins to the original, it instead recycles most the characters and locations. Instead of Sin City feeling like a city where anything can happen and anyone can be brought, you are left with a story where everything seems to revolve around the one seedy place. This is in contrast to the original where 3 separate stories were told that just happened to go through some of the same locales.
Along the way, it also seems to lose the sense of style that defined the first one. Without this style, even the first movie would have felt mediocre. Of the new stories told, the Dame story is the best, and even then it feels like it lacks any real depth. Too often it seems to fall into hero worship of the original characters (such as Marv and Miko), and it never feels like there is any real threat to them. When any of your characters feel like they can blast through the most dangerous henchmen that the most dangerous man in the city can muster, then the gritty style of the original movie is lost, and that feels like a problem for this kind-of movie.
There are other issues also present. Most of the acting isn't very good. The special effects look decidedly second-rate. The movie seems to go out of its way to prove that the main characters aren't bad people. But this could have all been forgiven if they nailed the gritty style of the original. They didn't so it ended up being quite a bore and easily missable.
1 out of 5 Waffles To Kill For.
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