Sin City: A Dame To Kill For presents the stars of 2005’s Sin City like you’ve never seen them. Never seen them age, we mean.
The thing that makes a comic book superior to film is that in comics, the characters can be as young or as old as the writer requires. This means you can generally stick them into a nebulous somewhere-between-25-and-40 zone for decades, thus saving the reader from ever having to (UGH) confront the horrible ravages of age in any substantial way. Sadly, film has no such luck, as actors continue insist on growing older despite years of negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the studios. The nerve!
But friends, that problem appears to be coming to an end, as special effects techniques have finally achieved what decades of science and billions worth of special effects never could: hand the aging process its ass. Behold, the first trailer for Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, in which Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Powers Booth reprise the roles they played in 2005’s Sin City for stories set before or concurrently with the earlier film despite it being nearly 10 years since their first go-round.
OK, kidding aside I’m looking forward to this movie, but I admit I my spider sense is tingling wildly. I love the 2005 film. Robert Rodriguez seemed to get how the comic’s general aesthetic would translate perfectly to the screen, and his movie managed to bring out performances from Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke that I thought the two might never deliver again. (Willis hasn’t since, though Rourke keeps flirting with a return to greatness.) This despite the fact that the comic is absolutely terrible. Miller’s art was never particularly good (yeah, I said it), the political themes are frankly childish, and its gender politics are, to put it mildly, really awkward.
But honestly, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For really should have come out two or three years after the original Sin City. Instead, it’s been nearly a decade, and a decade that hasn’t really been kind to Rodriguez or Frank Miller. Rodriguez’ Machete films are a laugh riot, but they’re narrative nonsense, essentially scenes of incredible ass-kicking by Danny Trejo patched together into a barely serviceable plot. And they’re probably the best thing he’s done during the period. Meanwhile, Frank Miller not only directed the execrable The Spirit, he also seriously went off the deep end and gave us Holy Terror and “I’m the Goddamned Batman.”
Still, I’m interested to see how the duo tackles not only material from the comics that predates the events of the previous film – and thus uses the aforementioned eerily-younger old actors – but the all-new stories written for this one. Take the criminally underused Eva Green and a guaranteed over-stylized rated-R bloodbath into account and you at least guarantee I’ll be in theaters day one.
But if it’s a hit, please don’t let Frank Miller behind the director’s chair alone again.
What do you think? Looking forward to it, or dreading it? Sound off in comments.
