When Sin City debuted in 2005, it hit like a sledgehammer. Frank Miller, a legend in the comics world, had teamed up with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to produce a neo-noir fantasy world tailor-made for the 21st century. It was visually groundbreaking; Rodriguez took Miller’s original graphic novel series and faithfully brought it to life on screen, using only black, white, and splashes of bright color as his palette. It may have lacked for substance, sure, but the movie — full of brutal anti-heroes and sexy femme fatales straight out of Mickey Spillane — dripped with a singularly bloodsoaked style that was hard to ignore.


It’s taken nine years to make the trip back, and the road has been hard. Despite announcing plans to release a follow-up soon after the film’s release, the Sin City 2 project was quickly delayed and fell into a long development hell. Meanwhile, Miller’s industry clout has been in an ongoing state of decline. While lauded for his early work on Batman and Daredevil, his later years have been marred by work that’s been rightly called racist, misogynist, and even occasionally fascist.


Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, once again co-directed by Miller and Rodriguez, is the long-awaited follow-up to the original film, promising a return to that world of booze, broads, and bullets that so captivated audiences all those years ago. It also promises a return to form for a master thought by many to be well past his prime. So, with a decade’s worth of perspective, a movie like this asks us if we’re willing to go back. Is Sin City worth the visit? The answer, frankly, is no.