Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (2014)

2/5

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is the most recent in a seemingly endless spate of uninspired summer sequels that do little more than attempt to rehash a winning franchise/formula and only end up disappointing everybody. It brings back some actors but not others (I was really hoping for a Clive Owen cameo, but it never came) and jumbles up the timeline in the most unnecessarily labyrinthine way. A lot of it just didn't make sense if you spent more than a few seconds thinking about the plot. The one saving grace is the pure villainy of the film's title character; she is a femme fatale for the ages.

A Dame To Kill For looks exactly the same as the original without feeling as inventive or awe-inspiring. While the first one was fresh and gritty, this one is tired and gruesome. The special effects and the writing both go way overboard in an attempt to one-up itself and raise the bar on violent deaths even more extravagantly. It's all a little too much--honestly even a little sickening--and we've seen it before. I loved the first one and saw it three times the first week it came out in theaters, but I have no desire to watch this one ever again.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458481/

300 (2006)

2/5

300 tries to be visually stunning, but doesn't quite succeed. Buildings look like unfinished Maya renderings. The thing that separates this movie from other movies that use CGI is the extent to which it's used, not the quality of it. There were only three scenes I really liked. The first was the shot of young Leonidas killing the wolf. The second was the action sequence where the two Spartans were advancing together. The third involved the undulating Oracle, because it was so surreal to watch and captured the mysticism it was intending so perfectly. It was also incredibly sexy.

But the rest of the movie sucked. When the actors spoke their lines, it was like watching piss spurt out of their mouths--a feat Sameer considers comedy, but one that I cringe at. It took a very long time for any real action to start, and when it came, it came in jumps and starts. To be quite honest, it was a pretty boring movie. There was a sex scene that was done in such a bizarre fashion that it made me feel almost as uncomfortable as watching the sex scene in Munich. The ending was awful; it should have ended 15 minutes earlier. Also, the ludicrous construction of the narration was laughable, unnecessary, and just plain bad filmmaking--on par with, if not exceeding, the reason for narration in Million Dollar Baby. What Jed didn't like about the movie, and I agree, is that there was so much potential in the story that the movie just threw out the window. Wholly unrecommended, although it might make a cool video game... at least to look at.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0416449/