There’s the nihilism of Frank Miller’s Sin City, where men are nothing but their rage and women are nothing but their bodies. But it pales in comparison to the nihilism of this latest story about the place, a movie consisting of little more than vignettes on vengeance and cruel parades of sociopathic power, performed as gleefully ultraviolent shadow-plays. It’s a movie where disjointed parts bounce around in a random nasty game of pinball. Is it paradoxical to suggest that even nihilistic stories need a reason to be told?
Dame is all ugly posturing, monstrous and merciless merely for the sake of merciless monstrosity. For extra bonus vacuity and confusion, the various plot threads here are not happening simultaneously; some are sequels to events in 2005's
Sin City, and others are prequels. Even the unique visual style of the film—black-and-white occasionally splashed with vivid, urgent color—seems little more than a gimmick. On the small plus side, you do get both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eva Green, two of the most bewitchingly magnetic actors onscreen today. They’re never together, alas; that might be too combustible even for Sin City.
By
MaryAnn Johanson