Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - Just doesn’t quite work this time

Like many, I really enjoyed the original ‘Sin City.’ Okay, I have never read any of the comics that it’s based on, so I can’t really compare the two mediums.  However, it just worked.  The main stories intertwined and were brutally original as they depicted the lives of the inhabitants of the fictional ‘Basin City.’ In fact, the first film was so popular it’s hard to believe it’s taken nearly a decade to produce a sequel.

But was it worth the wait?  Well... sort of.  I think that if the original Sin City didn’t exist, this one ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ would have been hailed as the classic that that first one was.  It’s hard to describe what exactly is wrong with the sequel.  It just has this vibe about it that says that something isn’t quite right.  And that’s weird because it contains all the elements of the first one.  Many of the central characters return this time round (notably Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba), but equally many of the others who were probably wanted couldn’t make it for one reason or another – due to other commitments or sadly passing away during the gap between productions.

The violence is also there.  It was probably tempting to the film-makers to lower the graphic content of the film to attract a younger audience to the cinemas.  Of course the general ‘look and feel’ of the film is kept identical (but then that’s no guarantee of success – take ‘The Spirit’ for example!).

For me, it was all about the dialogue.  Everything seems really stilted, like the actors are just reading their lines directly from the comic material it was based on.  There was one scene where I could practically see Mickey Rourke standing in a Hollywood sound studio while he read his lines and had them overlaid over the footage of his character walking the streets of Basin City.

Sin City 2 isn’t bad.  Its major sin (no pun intended) is that the first one was so good.  Therefore any sequel had too bigger mountain to climb to try and surpass it.  To sum up... For fans of the original, they could probably watch Sin City many times and still enjoy it.  As for the sequel... you could probably watch it every few years, but it would certainly never grace your TV screen as often as its predecessor.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that