Marval Movie

Sin City 2 is a movie that took ten years to make. It brings back most of the cast and still has the talent behind the camera, but it still has the source material behind it. The same meandering, misogynistic source material that is very warty.

As the title would imply, there is story in this movie called "A Dame To Kill For". It revolves around a photographer named Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) who is called by his former flame Ava Lord (Eva Green and said Dame To Kill For). She is worried that her husband wants to kill her and she needs help.

Eva Green is brilliant. She embodies pure Noir. With her long dark hair and seductive eyes, she is perfectly at home in this dark kill or be killed world of black, white and a little bit of color. She has trouble nailing down her accent for her first few scenes, but when she delivers her lines she delivers.

A lot of this movie is ogling at a naked Eva Green. I find myself caught in-between a rock and a hard place. On the one side the feminist in me is annoyed that this movie doesn't seem to have faith in its material, the performance, or its own visuals to hook its audience in enough and has to relay on appealing to their lowest instincts. On the other, Eva Green is very beautiful and I would be lying if I said that seeing her would be unappealing.

Jessica Alba probably delivers her best performance in this movie. Its not Oscar worthy, nor is it a truly acceptation performance. But I see a performance and not a pretty face that is speaking the words that were written on her script.

A character that shines this time is Senator Rourke, mostly because of the electrifying performance by Powers Boothe. The character didn't really strike a chord with me in the last movie but here is is phenomenally terrifying as the big bad boss of the city that will inflict hellish vengeance on anyone he chooses to.

Here just like in the last movie, there is the big ugly elephant in the room that takes the form of sexism. There's a story where one female character, that wasn't very independent in the last movie, gathers her strength and goes to seek vengeance for the wrong that has been done to her. But low and behold even in the end a man out-best's her and she needs a man the save her. Could she have done it by herself? Not a chance in this world.

Again as in the last movie this is great looking movie with stylized C.G.I. that translates the look of the comic beautifully. Maybe even better, this time we get to see more of the city in the overlooking shots and people actually fill the streets. In the original the city was rather dead, it was filled with whatever characters were needed for the scene and there would be nobody else in sight.

In the last movie it had a fascinating concept on how to handle continuity, with telling one characters story and they could die, but then you tell anothers and the first character could still be alive because it takes place in the past. Its still a neat idea but this movie throws the concept out the window because there's a story where a character is meant to be dead but they aren't, so clearly continuity just plain doesn't matter.

Sin City's sequel is a movie that has its predecessors strengths as-well as all its rotten faults. At times it fixes some of its predecessors problems while building on the bad things in the first movie. What we have is a sequel that is as good as the first movie but the levels are different.

Rating: 3 stars out of 4