Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) continues the first film and keeps the same visual method. It tells several stories at once: a young man who never loses at cards sitting down with the city's most powerful senator, a man named Dwight being trapped by a former lover, and a revenge plan of Nancy's. The chronology is scrambled; some sections take place before the first film and some after. The method is unchanged: shot entirely against green screen, printed in black and white, with individual elements coloured. A dress is red, a pair of eyes green, blood sometimes white. Frank Miller's panels are imitated directly. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez directed together, as they had on the first. The character Eva Green plays is at the centre and pushes the genre's female figure deliberately to an extreme. Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin and Bruce Willis are in the cast. The timing was the problem. The first film came out in 2005 and the sequel arrived nine years later; in that time the technique had been used widely elsewhere and lost its novelty. It failed badly at the box office, taking a fraction of the first film, and the series ended. The stories connect less well than in the first. It runs 102 minutes. Good for: comic adaptations, noir style, and visual experiment. Less good for: the violence is extreme, the writing of the women is a problem, and the first film's impact is gone.