Autumn FILM SPECIAL
FOR OUR SINS
Nine years after Sin City was released, Robert Rodriguez is back with a sequel to Frank Miller’s dark graphic novel. James Mottram discovers part two is just as unapologetically raunchy
I f there’s been one question Robert Rodriguez has faced over the past nine years, it’s this: When are you going back to Sin City? ‘To have a movie that people chase you down about to get a sequel for, that just doesn’t happen,’ nods the 46-year-old Rodriguez, who knows a thing or two on the subject, after making three El Mariachi i lms, two Machete movies and four Spy Kids adventures. ‘You don’t get that often, which is why we knew we needed to make a sequel.’
A slavishly faithful adaptation of Frank Miller’s grisly, neo-noir graphic novel, the original Sin City made a mint (well, $158 million) – impressive when you consider it transported audiences into the rotting bowels of the i ctional x-rated Basin City, a place where
strippers, thugs and even cannibalistic serial killers rub shoulder-to-shoulder. Sublimely realised via green-screen and CGI, it looked like a living comic book drawn in inky black-and- white with splashes of vivid colour. Its success meant a follow-up was always on the cards, even if Rodriguez and Miller took their time. The resulting Sin City: A Dame To Kill For takes us back to Basin City and is another series of vignettes – part-prequel, part- sequel, as various strands wrap around the original. It blends familiar mugs like Mickey Rourke’s memorable bruiser Marv with newcomers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s wise- ass gambler Johnny (in the new Miller-penned story, ‘The Long Bad Night’).
The centrepiece, however, is the titular A
Dame To Kill For, i rst published by Miller in 1993, as the follow-up to the original Sin City comic. Inspired by Billy Wilder’s classic 1944 noir Double Indemnity, Eva Green stars as sultry femme fatale Ava Lord, former lover to one Dwight McCarthy. The story takes place before events of Sin City’s ‘The Big Fat Kill’, when Clive Owen starred as Dwight (here played by Josh Brolin; a change allowed because their character undertook facial reconstruction in between the two yarns). Petitioning Dwight to help her escape her abusive spouse, all is not what it seems with Lord. ‘She’s a perfect seductress who can transform herself into men’s deepest desires,’ smiles Green, who has already entered into Frank Miller’s world once this year, in the
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21 Aug–18 Sep 2014 THE LIST 17