Peter Suderman Reviews Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

For this week’s movie review, I
took on the second Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez adaptation of
Miller’s Sin City comics:

The comic’s cartoon nihilism works in short bursts, as a kind of
concise, witty send-up of old crime and detective
stories. But on screen, at feature length, it’s a drag —
a movie with no hope or happiness, just two-dimensional doom and
despair.

The whole thing is delivered in a hard-boiled style so inhuman
and over-the-top that it verges on parody: Tenderness is replaced
with lust, levity with comic ultraviolence. The
characters all speak obsessively of blood and sweat and night and
the pointlessness of everything, and after an hour or so, you start
to see they have a point, if only about the movie you’re
watching.

The dialogue is so insistently one-note, that when you leave the
theater, it’s tempting to start talking in the same sort of gritty
one-liners as the characters: It’s a movie that runs you over like
a semi-truck, with dialogue that explodes like broken glass in your
ears. After a while, you wonder what the point is. You
don’t watch this movie — you take 100 minutes to stare at the
void.

Read the whole review in The Washington Times.
 

My friend (and Reason contributor) Sonny Bunch at
The Washington Free Beacon
took the Miller-esque reviewing to a whole different level. His
review is worth your time, even if the movie isn’t. 

One of the things I didn’t bring up in the review
is how influential Frank Miller has been on the past decade or so
of dark-and-gritty revisionist genre movies. 

A lot of those movies, in particular the Christopher Nolan
Batman films, which are heavily influenced by Miller’s two classic
Batman books, The Dark
Knight Returns and Year One, are really quite
good. And even now, Miller’s older comics stand up pretty well,
especially TDKR and some of his work on
Daredevil.  

But later in his career, Miller just went off the rails.
He had one idea—to reimagine practically everything as a grim,
brooding, and often gruesome crime story—and he pushed it way too
far, without much in the way of variation. His All-Star Batman and Robin was
rightly ridiculed for reading like a parody of a grim, gritty Frank
Miller comic. And by the time Holy Terror, a book that features a
thinly-veiled stand-in for Batman exterminating jihadists in a
mosque, came it, it went past
ridiculous and into awful and offensive. 

So part of what the one-note noirish bleakness
of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which Miller
co-directed and which is often as literal a translation from screen
to page as you can possibly imagine, offers is a reminder of how
fundamentally silly the purest form of that vision is, especially
when you try to move it off the comics page and into the world of
live-action. The audience at the screening I was at cracked up more
and more as the movie went on, and not because it was supposed to
be funny. 

Check out Kurt Loder’s review
here.