Robert Rodriguez approaches the material with the same enthusiastic vision that pulses off the screen, each image tweaked for maximum drama. The cast, some re-creating their roles from the first film (Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jamie King), and some new characters (played by Ray Liotta, Lady GaGa, Christopher Meloni, Christopher Lloyd, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and more), are all great, exhaling the hopelessness and desperation of living in a city overtaken by sin.
The vignette-structure returns, with a couple of additions written by Miller expressly for the film. At some points the film lags, loses focus, especially in the segues between vignettes where you can hear the gears creak. Thank goodness it's so pretty to look at, and it is fun to count the references to classic films. "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" starts with a snowy Saturday night in Marv's brutal, haunted, and angry life (Mickey Rourke). He stops off at the nudie bar to watch Nancy (Jessica Alba) dance, his anvil-shaped head glowering out at the world. He breaks up an atrocity about to be perpetrated in an alley by a bunch of preppy jerks. He has bouts of amnesia. It's "same ol' same ol'" for poor lonely Marv.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt appears in another vignette as Johnny, a reckless card shark, determined to infiltrate a high-stakes poker game run by a villainous senator (Powers Boothe, gloriously horrifying) with a shady past and a taste for cruelty. Johnny is a whiz at cards, dealing them out to the table with lightning-quick speed, astonishing everyone present. Nobody wins against the senator. The senator will kill you if you cross him. But Johnny will show him. It's personal.
"Nancy's Last Dance" involves Alba's character haunted by the apparition of Hartigan (Bruce Willis), staring at her from the back of the bar, a protector still. Nancy is not doing well, drinking too much, crying in her dingy apartment, hacking her hair off, her every thought starting to swirl toward payback.
And finally, Eva Green enters the scene as Ava Lord, the "dame to kill for" in the title. She is reminiscent of every black widow woman from every film noir ever made: Lana Turner wrapping John Garfield around her little finger in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" or Barbara Stanwyck playing Fred MacMurray like a violin in "Double Indemnity." One kiss with Ava Lord and, forget it, you're willing to do anything. There is one scene where Ava, totally nude, dives into her pool, and Rodriguez shows it to us doubled, two white nude bodies diving towards each other through the black, the water splashing out at us whitely in 3-D. It's a kaleidoscope moment, a Busby Berkeley nod, a perfect evocation of the dizzying effect this sociopath has on the men unfortunate enough to cross her path. Dwight (Josh Brolin, taking up the role played by Clive Owen in the first film) has a past with Ava, knows she is bad news, and yet there she stands at the doorway, in her bright blue silk coat, ravishing against the black-and-white scenery, and what is a man supposed to do? Eva Green plays Ava with a great and controlled relish, bringing on the crocodile tears or her sexuality or her helplessness when she needs them, her green eyes gleaming cunningly out of her black-and-white face.
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