When Robert Rodriguez unleashed “Sin City,” his version of the comic book movie, on the world in 2005, the most R rated the genre had gotten was “Blade,” which was two really terrific movies and one horrifically bad one, but it was more violence than sexuality. I’m not counting Pamela Anderson’s “Barb Wire,” both for my own purposes and because it was a terrible, terrible movie that was more a vehicle for her enhanced assets than an attempt to establish a legit comic franchise.
But many comics have included enhanced sexuality; women in comics are often busty Barbie-doll caricatures of the female form, from Wonder Woman fighting in a bustier, to the even more egregiously-drawn Power Girl, whose hero uniform is something resembling a rather modest white one-piece swimsuit…with a giant hole cut in the middle to showcase her massive cleavage.
But “Sin City,” and it’s upcoming sequel take it to a new level, with its stylized violence, strippers, and Rosario Dawson in a dominatrix outfit. It’s an offshoot of the genre, with no superheroes to be found, but plenty of characters out who would be perfectly at home in a Raymond Chandler novel. It was tawdry, R-rated, wickedly funny and stylistic…everything a grown-up male comic book fan would want in a flick.
It’s kind of a shame that the sequel, long in the works, is just now materializing, buried with a late-August release date and a low-profile release that can’t even gain attention by releasing a poster that glimpses Eva Green’s nipples.
By all measures it looks like the studio and just about everyone else is burying the long-gestating follow-up, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Maybe it’s been too long between movies, maybe it’s terrible, or, being a Miramax release, perhaps Rodriguez hacked off Harvey Weinstein and got his movie torpedoed by its own distributor (ask Joon-Ho Bong and his “Snowpiercer” about that).
Either way, the sexy comic book movie takes a hit this week…unless “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” scores unexpectedly at the box office.
