Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For arrives nine years after its predecessor and departs with roughly the same agenda, which is to say no agenda at all beyond rendering violence in high-contrast black and white. The film is an anthology of hard-boiled vignettes stitched together by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, and it moves through its stories with the grim efficiency of a man who has already decided what he thinks about the world and settled on the answer being nothing much. Bodies are idealized, sexualized, and frequently mutilated. Women arrive as strippers, dominatrixes, and prostitutes, and they are punished for it. This is not a film with a message. It is a film with a palette.

The ensemble is genuinely diverse, with Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Dennis Haysbert, Jamie Chung, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sharing the frame. None of them exist to make a point. The noir tradition has always cast widely and commented on it never, and this film follows the custom with a devotion that borders on the liturgical. Race is not a subject here. Neither is sexuality, nor the environment, nor the workings of the mind. The villains are a sadistic senator, a mob boss, and a quartet of rich frat boys who burn a homeless man alive for amusement. That last detail gestures toward class resentment, though it is the class resentment of pulp, aimed at individual monsters instead of systems, and it never builds toward an argument.

The film is set in a fictional city with no history to revise and no audience to instruct. It never stops to explain itself. It arranges its corpses and its neon and its rain-slick streets, and it lets the audience draw whatever conclusions it likes. That restraint is, in its way, admirable. It is also the reason the film feels like a museum piece, preserved in amber, beautiful and inert and entirely unconcerned with the century it was released into.