Comment on Review: 'Sin City' dives back into a noir abyss

In "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For," a belated, 3-D sequel to 2005's "Sin City," cultishly-adored graphic novelist Frank Miller and genre-exploiting director Robert Rodriguez have again jumped right into the same dark abyss Dick Powell's Marlowe fell into, into the same noir sea — or, at least, some hyper-stylized version of it. Like its predecessor, "A Dame to Kill For" was made with an almost entirely digital palate, placing actors — Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Eva Green — on a starkly black-and-white canvas in a fictional (but very Los Angeles-like) permanent-midnight metropolis of rampant crime, extreme brutality and skin-baring luridness. Stitched together are a grotesque handful of overlapping revenge tales carried out by thin stereotypes: a stripper (Alba) bent on killing a corrupt politician (the magnetic, teeth-clenching Powers Boothe); a pained loner (Brolin) caught in the spell of a Medusa-like femme fatale (Green, her green eyes aflame); a gambler (Gordon-Levitt) aiming to, at the poker table, humble the father (again Boothe's senator) who abandoned him. There are gestures to empowered women (Alba gets a gun in this one, and Rosario Dawson again reigns over the "Old Town" all-female gang) but they ring hollow amid the otherwise overbearingly juvenile presentation of women as scantily clad objects of fetish. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For," a Weinstein Co.