Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller return this weekend with a sequel to "Sin City" nine long years after the original. The critics' consensus is primarily negative, though many reviews have positive things to say about Eva Green's sultry performance.
Rolling Stone wanted to like the movie, but couldn't quite swallow it.
It's just that Sin City: A Dame To Kill For doesn't explode onscreen the way the first one did. Miller's monochrome palette, splashed with color that shines like a whore's lip gloss, doesn't startle as it once did. It's like running into an ex-love and realizing that, damn, the thrill is gone.
USA Today was unimpressed.
If viewers don't expect much from the wan drama and gimmicky story, they might be distracted by the striking visuals. But the hard-boiled denizens of Sin City are generally a monochromatic blur.
Hitfix utterly despised it, finding almost nothing to enjoy.
At this point, "Sin City" is threadbare parody piled on top of suffocatingly stylish homage, and the result is almost unbearable... tells a series of vaguely connected stories that build to no particular pay-off, and it almost feels like a statement on how smart, well-structured resolutions to stories are a bad thing, like Frank Miller's determined to write anti-punchline stories for the mere sake of doing it.
The long-delayed 'Sin City 2' lacks the stylish excess of the original https://t.co/9x4NgIQKlV pic.twitter.com/8oFtik8Rto
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) August 22, 2014
Variety nearly fell asleep.
Rare indeed is the movie that features this many bared breasts, pummeled crotches and severed noggins and still leaves you checking your watch every 10 minutes.
The Hollywood Reporter thought it felt like a cheap knockoff of the original.
...the big problem here is the sameness of the material throughout, the one-note tone. Every scene is given the same weight — there's no modulation, no sense of drama beyond mannered posturing, a feeling that the whole enterprise is about capturing a retro look and attitude and nothing else. The lack of any substance at all is what makes the Sin City franchise feel cheap, in the end.
Vulture didn't like it, to put it mildly.
This really is a graphic novel brought to life. But Rodriguez and Miller's definition of life is a colossal bore: "Death is just life in Sin City...," one character intones, and a universe so inevitably malignant can be just as insipid as a happy-time one.
The New York Times appreciated Eva Green as the title character, but nothing else.
Punishingly stylized, this marriage of comic-book panels and hard-boiled dialogue has a heaviness that can't be explained solely by its cynicism or lack of wit. It's a blunt instrument whose visual shadings far surpass the kill-or-be-killed storytelling.
"Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" is more low-key than the first "Sin City:" https://t.co/duiEMxBuiA pic.twitter.com/AUn2FKkSBd — Forbes (@Forbes) August 22, 2014
The Guardian liked as much of it as it hated.
The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns, populated in a couple of instances by second-choice faces: Josh Brolin for Clive Owen and Jamie Chung for Devon Aoki... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.
IGN, like many others, found Eva Green to be the best part of the movie.
...it's all-but impossible to recapture the refreshing and innovative experience that the first film offered moviegoers... Green is breathtakingly villainous and captivating as the soulless woman driven by a greed that can never be satiated.
Rope of Silicon was just plain bored.
A Dame to Kill For is ultimately it's own worst enemy. For all the creative kills it employs — head smashing, eye-gouging, arrows, samurai swords, broken fingers, etc. — after the first few they all blend together. The umph is lost in the reductive repetition, one bludgeoning scene after another.
