The Sin City comics were where their once brilliant creator Frank Miller’s development stopped. The high style of his graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which inspired the Batman films’ noir grimness and the whole superhero movie boom, was applied to insubstantial, immature tributes to pulp clichés, in black-and-white pages splashed with the red lipstick and blue dresses of its femme fatales. Miller’s co-directing credit with Robert Rodriguez for 2005’s Sin City film is repeated for this belated sequel, which squanders both men’s talents.
Miller’s script, sometimes lifted direct from his comics, was worked on for most of a decade. It still sags as its linked short stories fail to mesh, and coasts dully through scenes of loudly lopped heads, gyrating strippers and leaping, big-finned cars. The original film’s selling point – Rodriguez’s digital capture of the comics’ outlandish style, brought to further life by a rogues’ gallery of film stars – still works. Mickey Rourke’s giant-jawed, sentimental brute Marv returns (the make-up further warping Rourke’s mashed and remoulded face), as do Jessica Alba’s stripper and, in ghost-form, Bruce Willis’s honest cop.
Two splendid, screen-jolting villains justify Miller’s moral monochrome. Eva Green (recently the saving grace of another Miller adaptation’s sequel, 300: Birth of an Empire) is all bad, and often all naked, as Ava, eyes glinting green as she bewitches Josh Brolin’s dumb lug. She has the fierce yet chilly glamour of the best Forties femme fatales. The rest of a strong female cast are wasted. But there’s also Powers Boothe’s cruelly malignant Senator, pictured above, unwisely challenged at poker by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s tough young card-sharp. It’s a treat to see Boothe, a great Eighties heavy and hero, at alarming full throttle. These actors fill Miller’s broad strokes with complex charisma. They faintly echo the feverish power of James Ellroy, and the older pulp fiction Sin City clumsily adores.
