How the Sin City: A Dame to Kill For actress walked away with the year’s most macho sequels.
Josh Brolin and Eva Green in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.
Dimension Films
Most of the thrill of the original Sin City is gone in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's follow-up to their innovative 2005 graphic-novel adaptation, set in a stylized, digitally engineered world of black and white with splashes of color. The movie, which floundered at the box office when it debuted this past weekend, is just as intensely violent, lurid, and nihilistic as the first one, and this time, it's in 3D, which lends an added oomph to its sometimes beautiful compositions. But Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is also stupefyingly — 100-plus minutes of just the climax of a story, everything turned up to 11, the characters so interchangeably hard-boiled that it can take a while to realize Josh Brolin is actually playing the same character Clive Owen did in the previous film.
It's disappointing, except for the one thing Sin City: A Dame to Kill For does have that the first installment didn't: a scene-stealing Eva Green, who, as Ava Lord, burns a giant hole in the center of the screen. In a movie in which Jessica Alba humps a stage and Mickey Rourke plucks out someone's eyeball like he's picking a particularly stubborn daisy, it's not easy to be the center of attention, but Green easily dominates the gritty, gory affair. Her Ava is less femme fatale than dark deity, a goddess of self-destruction who men can't help but cower in front of.
And Sin City: A Dame to Kill For isn't the first hyper-macho Frank Miller sequel this year that Green's walked away with — as Artemisia, the bloodthirsty villain in March's 300: Rise of an Empire, she totally bowled over the indistinguishable muscly male lead (Sullivan Stapleton, if you'd forgotten). Ever since her 2003 debut alongside Michael Pitt and Louis Garrel in Bernardo Bertolucci's racy The Dreamers and her 2006 stint as proto-Bond girl Vesper Lynd, Green's proven to be a little too much for Hollywood — too formidable for happily-ever-afters, too much presence to be a character actor, too beautiful to be ignored, and too...goth-y? But in 2014, Green's been carving out a distinctive career for herself as the scariest and most intimidating of sex symbols, and it's been awesome to watch.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Dimension Films
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