Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
Weinstein Company, The | Release Date: August 22, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
46
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
9
Mixed:
23
Negative:
6
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 21, 2014
This is one badass movie. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramAug 20, 2014
Not as groundbreaking as the original, nor as expansive as all the best sequels are. But with some excellent cast additions, and Miller on murky form, this still sizzles to the touch. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyAug 22, 2014
At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 22, 2014
This movie is mostly about visual razzle-dazzle and riffing on film noir conceits. Rodriguez hasn't deviated far from his mission statement for the original and that's a good thing for Sin City fans. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallAug 21, 2014
Despite its unsavory aspects, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is always a pleasure to observe, so artfully artificial with its green-screened backdrops and CGI props. Read full review
70
TimeRichard CorlissAug 25, 2014
Gaudily entertaining, occasionally wearying sequel. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAug 20, 2014
Visually, the film’s technique is thrilling. There’s hardly a camera setup anywhere that doesn’t look like it could be a frame ripped from a comic book or graphic novel. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTom RussoAug 21, 2014
You could argue that the only thing that’s automatic about A Dame to Kill For, really, is some of the firepower that its hardcases are packing. Read full review
63
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsAug 21, 2014
Alba is a showstopper in a fringed cowgirl outfit. But nine years wiser, we know that pretty things aren’t always worth killing for. Read full review
60
The GuardianMike McCahillSep 22, 2014
The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should. Read full review
60
Film.comJordan HoffmanAug 21, 2014
It has a nose for what's cool, but is completely inept at execution. Read full review
60
EmpireJames WhiteAug 20, 2014
A Dame To Kill For shares some of the downsides of the first, particularly dubious female characterisation. But this retains the gritty, gruelling vice-grip on graphic-novel noir that made Sin City so enjoyable. Read full review
60
The TelegraphRobbie CollinAug 20, 2014
Sin City 2 glowers and sulks and is determined to show you the best bad time you’ve had in years. It’s neither high art nor noir, but it’s what a Sin City film should be. Read full review
58
Portland OregonianStephen WhittyAug 22, 2014
There's an all-the-scenery-you-can-eat appearance by the deliciously mad Eva Green, too, who spends most of the movie even more naked (and nuttier) than she was in "300: Rise of an Empire." The ever-wry Joseph Gordon-Levitt also shows up as a cocky gambler, while a simian Josh Brolin takes over from Clive Owen as Dwight. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyJason ClarkAug 22, 2014
The overall effect is less titillating than numbing. Read full review
58
The PlaylistDrew TaylorAug 20, 2014
If you’re not looking for reinvention and loved the first "Sin City," then you'll probably love this one too. It's a gorgeous-to-look-at, brain-splattered case of "more of the same." Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinAug 22, 2014
The highest-gloss revenge porn imaginable. It’s hard to believe that so much visual elegance has been brought to bear on material so ugly, and yet the disjunction is intentional, and the film is all of a piece. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyAug 21, 2014
It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s. Read full review
50
Washington PostStephanie MerryAug 21, 2014
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is as visually imaginative as its predecessor. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia PuigAug 21, 2014
The cartoonish mayhem in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For aims for a film noir sensibility, but too frequently the script simply resorts to anachronistic scenes of Jessica Alba twerking. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 21, 2014
To stay fresh, you have to evolve. Rodriguez and Miller have stayed the same. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 21, 2014
If Rodriguez had any selectivity as an action director and a purveyor of garish thrills, the violence might have an impact beyond benumbing the spectator. "Sin City 2" keeps piling on, flipping the visual pages and selling the same ancient lessons in misogyny that real noir, or neo-noir, exploited yet transcended. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 21, 2014
Miller's monochrome palette, splashed with color that shines like a whore's lip gloss, doesn't startle as it once did. It's like running into an ex-love and realizing that, damn, the thrill is gone. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyAug 20, 2014
As an exercise in style, it's diverting enough, but these mean streets are so well traveled that it takes someone like Eva Green to make the detour through them worth the trip. Read full review
50
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreAug 20, 2014
"A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Aug 21, 2014
In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him? Read full review
40
Time OutJoshua RothkopfAug 22, 2014
[Eva] Green is the only one able to excite this silly material into the spiky shape it’s supposed to take. You wish the rest of the cast was as clued in. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyAug 21, 2014
There is an interesting kernel of a story about beauty, betrayal and brutality inside each of the film's scenarios and a cast that could handle anything thrown at it. But the kernel never pops, and all we're really left with is a whole lot of neo-noir corn. Read full review
40
The New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisAug 21, 2014
The best antidote to all the glowering and posing is Eva Green: As Ava, the titular dame, she’s nothing short of a godsend. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 21, 2014
The sequel to one of the most visually striking movies of the last 10 years continues the graphic novel-inspired landscape of its predecessor. But the characters don’t click, and the action feels dull. Read full review
40
CineVueJamie NeishAug 21, 2014
As much as the sequel aches to remind audiences of what they liked first time round, it struggles to establish itself as its own unique entity. Read full review
40
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonAug 19, 2014
Green is sexy, funny, dangerous, and wild -- everything the film needed to be -- and whenever she's not on-screen, we feel her absence as though the sun has blinked off. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineChris CabinAug 20, 2014
Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy. Read full review
33
HitfixDrew McWeenyAug 21, 2014
This entire film is like someone raised a kid in a room, cut off from all contact with the outside world, and all he had was a stack of Hustlers, a stack of Soldier of Fortunes, and a bunch of black-and-white stills from old detective movies, and at the age of 14, that kid gets turned loose and spends two hours screaming in your face about these stories he's been writing. Read full review
30
VarietyJustin ChangAug 20, 2014
It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubAug 21, 2014
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is still a visual buffet, but adding 102 more minutes of double crosses, slow torture and hookers with hearts of gold just exposes the tediousness of the exercise. Read full review
10
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeAug 20, 2014
For a film loaded with decapitations and gun-toting ladies in bondage gear, Sin City gets really tedious really quickly. Read full review
0
The DissolveNathan RabinAug 22, 2014
It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core. Read full review
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