well shit, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For ends up being not exactly great, but I'm not entirely sure why. Its certainly no less violent, nudity packed (holy crap at Eva Green), or fatalistic then its predecessor, but it sure feels a lot less novel, energetic, and even thrillingly vulgar then the film it follows. Were those flaws always there? I don't think they were as much, the stories in Sin City were snare drum tight, this time they meander a bit. The characters last time were paper thin but performed with verve, this time around not everybody acquits themselves as well, not even all of the returning players do. There's a lot of parts that are great fun, some impeccably shot bits, some fun story turns. The math is the very much the same but this time it doesn't add up as well. Its hard to be too disappointed by a film that's still entertaining on the whole, but I kinda was, go figure.
I'm now officially putting Robert Rodriguez on my shit list, as everything he's done for the last decade now seems like a inferior reversion of something he already did (or in Machete's case, did so even more recently). Sorry Rob, lay off the sequels and we'll talk, yeah?