It may have lacked for substance, sure, but the movie - full of brutal anti-heroes and sexy femme fatales straight out of Mickey Spillane - dripped with a singularly bloodsoaked style that was hard to ignore.
It was visually groundbreaking Rodriguez took Miller’s original graphic novel series and faithfully brought it to life on screen, using only black, white, and splashes of bright color as his palette. Frank Miller, a legend in the comics world, had teamed up with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to produce a neo-noir fantasy world tailor-made for the 21st century. As an exercise in style, it’s diverting enough, but these mean streets are so well traveled that it takes someone like Eva Green to make the detour through them worth the trip.When Sin City debuted in 2005, it hit like a sledgehammer. The lack of any substance at all is what makes the Sin City franchise feel cheap, in the end. 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. But the big problem here is the sameness of the material throughout, the one-note tone. There are other occasional highlights, including a titanic fight between Marv and Ava’s warrior chauffeur Manute, a role first played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan and now by Dennis Haysbert, and a final showdown involving the vile Roark. Frequently baring all in a way that was not allowed in the ’40s and ’50s and often lit by Rodriguez (who did triple duty as director, DP and editor here) in a high-contrast style accentuated by slatted light through blinds, Green more than earns femme fatale immortality by first reiginiting Dwight’s fire, then going through a succession of other admirers, including her loaded husband ( Marton Csokas) and a married cop ( Christopher Meloni) before receiving her well-deserved comeuppance. Pulp and noir were often built on the beautiful shoulders of such characters as Ava, and the main justification for seeing the film is to watch Eva Green claim membership in the pantheon of film noir leading ladies alongside Jane Greer, Gloria Grahame, Marie Windsor, Peggy Cummings, Lizabeth Scott and a few others.
He’s sober now and he tells himself he won’t weaken, yet he cannot refuse her request when she summons him to Kadie’s. This certainly applies to Dwight ( Josh Brolin), whose torrid affair with her ended four years earlier. Of greater interest in any event is anything and everything involving Ava (Green), a spider woman so fatally gorgeous and seductive that no man can resist her. Johnny’s dunder-headedness over not resting on his laurels but trying to further challenge Roark on his own turf makes the rest of this episode rather annoying despite some tensely violent interludes. With dancer Goldie ( Jaime King) as his good luck charm, he wipes out the old man - but, with arrogant stupidity, doesn’t just leave it at that. Turning up for the first time at Kadie’s one dark night is Johnny ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a hotshot young gambler who pushes his way into Roark’s backroom poker game.
As before, the center of action is Kadie’s saloon, where Marv keeps a benevolent eye on exotic dancer Nancy ( Jessica Alba), who is periodically shadowed by the specter of Hartigan ( Bruce Willis), who in the earlier film gave his life to protect her from Sin City’s sinister political boss, Senator Roark ( Powers Boothe). First among equals on the mean streets of Sin City as far as tough guys are concerned is Marv ( Mickey Rourke), a gigantic, easy-going, longtime hell-raiser whose age gives him a mordantly amused perspective on life but who is easily prodded back into action, especially if it involves handing cops their heads on a platter.