SIN YOU WENT AWAY

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For... well, actually it's pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and individual personality against the background of nostalgia. Whereas A Dame to Kill For is powerfully eager to act like not a minute has gone by since Sin City opened, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic and using extensive make-up to erase the passage of nearly a decade from every returning star's face.

What I started off to say is that, as far as nine-years-later sequels go, A Dame to Kill For could have been infinitely worse. Because, when all is said and done, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic - that is to say, the aesthetic the original film exactly copied from the Sin City comics of writer/artist Frank Miller, whose visual concepts were translated so precisely that director Robert Rodriguez extended him a directing credit, exactly the situation that attains in the sequel - isn't such a terrible thing as all that, when even after most of a decade, you can still count on one hand all the films that have recalled into Sin City's extremely unique style of harsh monochrome and all-CGI sets designed with the thinness of angry line drawings. And you can count on no hands the number of good films to have done so. Unhappily, A Dame to Kill For doesn't buck that trend; we'll get there in a moment. First I want to finish saying nice things about the way the movie looks, because it's just about the last nice thing I'll have to say. The one big change the new film makes is that, coming in 2014 instead of 2005, it gets to take advantage of 3-D: and for all that I'd have predicted that a 3-D rendering of such a vigorously 2-D art style would look be hideous on a pre-verbal level, actually, A Dame to Kill For turns that to its advantage, pitching itself somewhere between a shadowbox of paper cut-outs and an exploration of the possibilities of pure visual geometry, shapes and dots suddenly gaining some kind of unexpected texture from their planar relationships. It is surely the first and so-far only essential work of 3-D I've seen in 2014; or maybe it would be better to say that it's the only film for which it is distinctly better in three dimensions than in two. I mean, we're lifetimes away from Gravity here.

That nicety aside, the film is not very good, occasionally drifting into outright putrescence. And this was predictable as far back as 2006, when a Sin City sequel first started to form in Rodriguez's hopelessly optimistic eyes. Of the six books and one short story collection that make up the published entirety of Sin City, there's really only one great story and two pretty solid ones, by my reckoning, and the two best were already used in the first movie. Now, A Dame to Kill For is the other pretty solid one. So that's a leg up. And the filmmakers have the basic good sense to avoid the other full-length stories, Family Values (which is impenetrably awful) and Hell and Back (which is better on the merits, but only just, and it's dismally fucking long). Instead, the film rounds out its content with two new stories: "The Long Bad Night" (which, if I understand it correctly, is fleshed out from an unfinished story Miller has had around for a while), and "Nancy's Last Dance" (entirely new), and one of the better pre-existing short stories, "Just Another Saturday Night".

The last of these opens the movie as a prologue, and it's easily the peak of the film: a nice way to warm back up to the style, the moral corrosion, the dementedly hard-boiled dialogue, and the warped physicality of the characters in the form of Rourke's probably schizophrenic thug Marv. The other two are, I want to reiterate, new Frank Miller. "The Long Bad Night" much less so, but "Nancy's Last Dance" is a kind of no-holds-barred tour of all the incomprehensibly dark things that have happened inside Miller's head in the 21st Century, with its rageholic violence and disregard for any kind of logic or linearity (it is, I think, completely impossible to square with the existing Sin City chronology) and even the most modest coverlet ripped off of Miller's deeply unpleasant thoughts about women. Which seems even worse here since it seems evident from the focus on tragic stripper Nancy (Alba) and the voiceover she speaks - I believe, the first ever written for a Sin City woman - that this is trying to redress the baked-in sexism.

And A Dame to Kill For has the intense misfortune to end with "Nancy's Last Dance", which means that for the last 20-odd minutes of the 102-minute feature (more than 20 minutes shorter than Sin City), we are pummeled over and over with a nonsensical, needless story that can't put a single foot right (career-worst acting from Alba! Bruce Willis as a sad ghost!) and is almost too ugly for words, so whatever kindly feelings one can generate towards the film are bashed into pieces by the structure that insists on leaving us wanting so much less.

Not that kindly feelings are in strong supply. It's not a long movie, really, but the pacing is all whacked to hell, making it feel positively endless for stretches, and the insertion of "A Dame to Kill For" right in the middle of "The Long Bad Night" does neither any favors - particularly since "A Dame to Kill For" lacks the tendons connecting the two new stories, so instead of feeling like a collection of vignettes, like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For feels almost like one story that has a completely irreconcilable other story twisting around in its middle. "The Long Bad Night" is, itself, a pretty drowsy affair: Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a shockingly lucky gambler who picks up the sweet-natured bar waitress Marcie (Julia Garner) to watch him humiliate the most powerful man in the hopelessly corrupt Basin City - Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) - at poker. He has his own reasons, embarrassingly easy to predict, for wanting to needle Roark, and this perhaps overshadows his judgement about not fucking with psychopaths who have the police and the gangs at their disposal. Meanwhile, in "A Dame to Kill For", gloomy private eye Dwight (Josh Brolin) is approached by his former flame Ava (Eva Green) to help free him from her abusive husband (Marton Csokas) and his thuggish chauffeur Manute (Dennis Haysbert, replacing the late Michael Clarke Duncan, whom he resembles only in that he is an African-American man). But this is noir, and Ava is much too fatale a femme to possibly mean good news. Which Dwight knows and goes in after her anyway, because when somebody is played by Eva Green in full-on "I will play my flawless naked body like a Stradivarius" mode, it's easy to buy her as the kind of sexual enchantress that no male with even the ghost of heterosexuality inside of him could possibly resist. And there are, of course, only heterosexual males in Sin City. And pedophiles, but not in this movie.

The entirely subjective problem with this isn't that any of it is "bad" bad, but that virtually all of it is dull: as written, "A Dame to Kill For" is light-years better than the almost plotless "The Long Bad Night", but both coalesce into a sort of indistinguishable mushiness in Rodriguez and Miller's flabby directorial hands. The titular story is simply not paced well at all, lurching to life in fits and starts, but never maintaining itself - scenes drag on and dither and collapse.Worse yet, especially compared to the original movie, the acting is at an almost uniformly low ebb: Rourke is basically as good as he was last time, but with less interesting material to play, which is enough to make him the stand-out. Brolin and Gordon-Levitt give almost the exact same bad performance of a cold-blooded hard-ass, with Brolin courting goofy excess a bit more freely (especially in the final act of his sequence, when he really should have been replaced by the unavailable Clive Owen). Horrifyingly, even Green can't do all that much: she plays an almost mythically cruel woman well enough, I suppose, and it's easy to take for granted any performer who can be that at ease with her nude body and draw it up into her performance. But she already did both of these things earlier in 2014 in 300: Rise of an Empire, where she managed to, if certainly not "redeem" the character's grossly sexist clichés, at least play them up with a lifesaving amount of broad wit and tactically deployed campiness that recalls Vincent Price, if Vincent Price was an unbelievably hot woman prone to nude scenes. In that film, Green ripped herself out of the movie, off the screen, and into some totally other universe where she could just be jaw-droppingly magnetic. Here, she successfully embodies a straightforward, long-established stock character that, if she hadn't already existed on the page since 1993, could have easily been introduced in a pitch meeting as "we need to put an Eva Green type in this movie". Which is nowhere near as impressive, nor as film-rescuing.

Green's limitation is the film's as well: it's just not interesting in any way. It looks nice: shiny and stylised and glittering with its hard whites and jet blacks moving along the Z-axis. But it doesn't look any nicer than the 21-year-old comic book that it's re-staging, and sucking all of the life from in the process.

4/10

Read More

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE MERRY WORLD OF FRANK MILLER

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men are brutal nihilists and women are slutty slutwhores and buildings are CGI. All this was a little fresher last time around.

There's such a huge gap between the experience of watching Sin City when it was new in 2005, and the experience of watching it almost a full decade later, it feels like two entirely different movies, damn near. Thus it is with films which were at one point on the technological bleeding edge - and oh, how very bloody that edge was in the case of Sin City when it was new. It's almost quaint to think of it now, but there was a time when a "live-action" movie that took place almost entirely in CGI environments was enormously radical. Prior to Sin City, there had been the half-steps of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, both of which (in those glory days, there was merely a "both", and we could still hold out hope that he'd right things) involved extensive use of CGI set-building; and in 2004, Kerry Conran wrote and directed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the first American film with 100% digitally-created backdrops for its human actors to interact with; or rather, not to. And in the same year, the French Immortel and the Japanese Casshern were released, both of which also featured only synthetic sets.

But the Star Warses were unpleasantly eager to declare themselves tech demos with terrible narratives and insipid characters reluctantly tacked on, Sky Captain married truly exquisite, imaginative world building to a story that barely exists, and the foreign films made nary a ripple in the States, incapable of proving to Hollywood that an extraordinary new tool for making whole worlds without the tedious labor of making whole worlds now existed, and thus creating the rather dubious world in which we now live. That honor fell to Sin City, the first film of the lot to use this all-digital set creation because it served the greater purposes of the movie, rather than as an end in and of itself. Now that every single mainstream movie from the enormous effects-driven tentpoles to the modest character stories comes in with a sheen of computer-generated Vaseline over everything, it's easy to forget how astonishing this felt at the time; that a movie could and should create a completely synthetic world to provide the right environment for its story to thrive.

In the particular case of Sin City, that environment and that story (stories, rather) can be described in the same way: an amped-up exaggeration of the style, world, and moral ethos of film noir. It's asking far too much to suggest that the film is a parody of the genre, for Frank Miller, author and artist of the comic book series from which the film has been slavishly adapted, would not appear to have nearly enough of a sense of humor to write such a thing as a parody. But it is an exaggeration to the most absurd extremities, a kind of apotheosis of the curdled nihilism, violence, sexism, and urban rot that make up noir. The enormous stylisation - also slavishly adapted from the comics, which functionally serve as the movie's storyboards - is, likewise, an intensified version of the Expressionist photography that turned realistic urban settings into hellish, almost surreal spaces, rendered as little more than black and white lines and shapes with absolutely no room in between for shading, or for human habitation. Individual elements of color, mostly reds with some yellow, blue, and rarely green here or there, serve to provide some minute measure of respite from the savage black and white, a flicker of life whether in the form of love, death, or terror, anything that's not the sheer grinding agony of life in Basin City.

The film's overriding problem - assuming that the whole "ultra-nihilistic extreme expression of film noir style and morality" isn't a problem for you, as it is not for me (and making allowances for how the film watches in 2005 as opposed to 2014, I'm still quite a big fan of the movie) - is that it's so indebted to the comic books, adding nothing but motion and the various textures of the performances. The nominal director, Robert Rodriguez, does very little to the film other than facilitate it; the honorary directorial credit he gave to Miller (without which we would maybe not have Miller's putrid 2008 film of The Spirit, a film that blindly copies Sin City's aesthetic with an incomparably worst script and performances) admits as much, and the fact that the one scene "guest-directed" by Quentin Tarantino is indistinguishable from the rest of the film other than having a slightly looser performance from Benicio Del Toro speaks to how little personality the movie actually possesses that it didn't borrow from Miller.

And as we kind of knew in 2005, and know to an absolute dread certainty in 2014, borrowing personality from Frank Miller is a rather dubious thing to do. This shows in Sin City itself, which is good and bad almost entirely as a function of the quality of the original comic stories it's adapting: it's based on the first, third, and fourth "Sin City yarns", as Miller referred to them during the book's original run in the 1990s, apparently recognising that the word "stories" implies more structure and discipline than his feverish lashings of urban nightmare rage possessed. The first and third - "The Hard Goodbye" and "The Big Fat Kill" - are possibly the best of all seven Sin City miniarcs, in the tightness of their construction and the effectiveness of how Miller's art (which is literally re-created onscreen) works within the mood created by that story. The fourth - "That Yellow Bastard" - is, I would argue, the exact moment when you can watch the early Frank Miller who was largely good if thoroughly retrograde in some of his opinions about vigilante justice, women, and government, starts to turn into the sour-minded crank Frank Miller, who'd fully emerge in the final Sin City yarn, "Hell and Back", and would be responsible for the ghastly The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Holy Terror and the angry, unfunny pastiche All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. And that plays off in the movie, as well, which somewhat awkwardly welds the three units into one film that presumably was meant to have the structural payoffs of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, but doesn't get there. The first two segments (following two prologues), centering around Mickey Rourke's big menacing thug with a heart of gold Marv, and Clive Owen's hitman-in-hiding Dwight, are both delightful, nasty-minded wallows in excess, misanthropy, style. The third, with Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a disgraced cop sent to prison for taking down the psychopathic son of a powerful senator, only to emerge years later to protect the demure, almost fully-clothed stripper, Nancy (Jessica Alba) that he'd rescued as a girl, from the yellowish gnome-man (Nick Stahl) trying to kill them both... that part's just bleak and miserable and gross.

Of course, all of it's a little bleak and miserable and gross. There's a whole cannibalism subplot. But there's a difference between the grubbiness of the third sequence and the arch, even self-parodying way that it's depicted in the first two segments, with their geysers of white blood silhouetted against black, their armies of militant prostitutes (led by an absolutely terrific Rosario Dawson), their curt dialogue that suggests what happens when you take hard-boiled tough-guy slang and let it sit on the fire for another hour or two (Owen, grim and staring, never flexing his chin at all, is terrific at delivering this). Two-thirds of Sin City comes from a place of love and enthusiasm for the overblown possibilities of guttural, pitch-black noir, and that's the part that matter most, the part that especially benefits from the film's prideful creation of elaborate, wholly unpersuasive digital sets. When it's working, Sin City primarily resembles people giddily play-acting at being film noir toughies, everybody going as bad-ass as they can manage to top the actors that, in many cases, they weren't even performing against. It's extremeness and artifice take on an energy that's surprisingly playful, given how pitch-black everything is: so hyper-dramatic that even the most horrifying elements play as a sort of quiet camp rather than bland torture porn. The years have, alas! dulled it somewhat. But the bad-boy naughtiness still works, and if the film has suffered, it's only a victim of its own success.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: ITALIAN SLASHERS

1982's The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the '70s for visual flair and psychologically bent terror, the film bears not a trace of the poetically gory hands of the man who just one year before had wrapped up his celebrated Gates of Hell trilogy with The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

We'll get back to that; in the meantime, let's ease into the thing. The New York Ripper opens with an elderly man (Sal Carollo) and his dog, the man shot in such disorientingly tight, pinched close-ups that I thought for certain that he was being set up as some demented figure who'd play a considerable role in the sick drama to follow, and not just a dude who would literally never appear again after the opening credits. All he's there for is to be part of a game of fetch gone wrong, when his dog brings back a rotting hand. This hand becomes the problem of NYPD officer Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley), who you can tell just from looking at him is one of those world-weary sorts who has seen it all, and found all of it depraved and wanting. The kind who can reel off the statistic that eleven people are murdered in his jurisdiction every day, half of them women, and do so with the sort of bored, slumped posture that suggests he has no more emotional stake in that fact than he does in the Mets' current woes.

What Williams doesn't know is that he's just been given a serial killer case, or should I say he's been handed the case, because y'know, the fact that there was a hand, it's like a pun. In fact, New York is about to be plagued by a series of killings committed by a person whose only persistent identifiable characteristic is a tendency to speak in a voice like a psychopathic Donald Duck. A more psychopathic Donald Duck, anyway. After the next violently mutilated body shows up, of a woman (Cinzia de Ponti) slashed through the genitals, Williams calls in an expert on maniacs, Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) of Columbia University. The two of them begin to develop a plan to find and stop the killer, though Williams is so hard-boiled and resigned to a world of shit, and Davis so generally callous, that neither of them are trying very hard. Eventually, the case starts to break when one victim, Fay Majors (Almanta Keller) manages to survive wounds, and with her boyfriend Peter (Andrew Occhipinti, under the American market friendly name of Andrew Painter) begins to endure an entire series of failed attempts by the Quacking Ripper on her life. Though even this proves to be less use than it immediately seems; the man she's able to identify as her attacker, Mikis Kalenda (Howard Ross) is revealed rather soon after to us as merely the procurer for the actual Ripper, finding the kind of "dirty" or otherwise morally compromised women that the killer prefers.

In its bones, then, this is basically just a routine giallo, a nice urban murder mystery. It came out in the Slasher Era, which means that the focus is less on psychological discombobulation (the spine of all the very best gialli), and more on evocative, high-impact violence, but it's not like the gialli were exactly squeamish about such matters. Still, the quantity and degree of the violence in The New York Ripper is quite impressive: enough to get the film banned in Britain during the Video Nasties days, despite it not being on the Nasties list itself. In fact, the violence in the film is so prominent and so pronounced in its impact that it's kind of hard to talk about anything else. That is, in fact, the nugget of the argument of the faction that decries the film as lesser, if not indeed outright terrible Fulci (having developed a good-sized cult in the years after its toxic early reception, this remains the most divisive of the director's movies): that it is nothing but an exercise in watching brutal acts of highly creative and wicked acts of violence against women, a torture porn film years and years before anybody even thought of suggesting that was a genre. It's no fun to side with the prudes, but I absolutely have to, in this case: The New York Ripper is a squalid, joyless exercise in extreme gore, with a ridiculous fig leaf at the end when it reveals the killer and explains his motives in a way that could potentially serve as a sign that the movie is indicting acts of male violence against women, if only it didn't come after the specific 85 minutes of cinema preceding that reveal.

I am irresistibly drawn to compare the film to William Lustig's Maniac from two years earlier, for the two films resemble each other closely. Both are set in a version of New York that focuses on the shabbiest, filthiest corners of that city during one of the nastier periods in its history, and both depict acts of horrifying cruelty against women. Neither is a film that's much fun to watch in anyway, and anybody suggesting that it might be is probably worth avoiding in small group settings, but for all that it is a sick, slimy affair, Maniac at least feels like it has some depth and purpose. It's rubbing our faces in the worst of humanity with the exact point of making us feel degraded and awful about it; it comes from a place of thematic and sociological nihilism, but it has themes and sociology. The New York Ripper doesn't manage quite the same feat: it depicts more disgusting acts but with less visceral implication of the viewer. It presents torture for us to watch, it doesn't assault us with torture. And because of this, it's basically an empty exercise. Not that, God knows, I think that every good horror film needs to make us feel awful about death and violence, or anything like that. I am a huge, even starry-eyed fan of The Beyond, which has plenty of extreme and foul-minded scenes of violence, and it makes absolutely no claims to thematic depth at all. But it has artistry behind it: it imparts mood using its visuals about as well as any horror film I can name, and even if it's basically just spectacle, it's spectacle that's emotionally transporting. The New York Ripper is just a wallow in bad behavior, too wearying to even make one angry. It's not in the least scary, it's gross. Emphatically and unapologetically gross, and there's no art to that.

The gulf between The New York Ripper and Maniac, or The Beyond, or a hundred other, better violent horror movies, is typified by its sex show scene. By the mere fact that it has a sex show scene, in which a woman named Eva (Zora Kerova) and a man with no name at all (Urs Althaus) are onstage in one of the seediest adult theaters in the blighted hellhole of early-'80s Times Square, having sex for an audience that includes Kalenda, and a smartly-dressed woman we'll later learn is called Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), the latter of whom masturbates while watching, the camera cutting from the sex act she's watching to extreme close-ups of her mouth twisting in pleasure. Which is, to be fair, the most classy, artful way to film a scene of a woman masturbating at a Times Square live sex show that you could possibly hope for.

But then, the question arises, is this actually a scene that a film like The New York Ripper requires? If so, is it a scene that needs to go on for as long as it does (notably, most of the censorship the film has undergone pertains to its sex, not its violence - which opens up a whole other conversation, but still)? Probably not and no, respectively. And even then, the scene is a masterpiece of narrative concision compared to the later scene in which Jane is foot-raped in a bar. These are lingering, sordid moments, ones where sex is glared at with a blank, disinterested focus by the filmmakers, and it feels more like something out of a Joe D'Amato picture than anything I'd associate with Fulci in his prime. Not a complimentary comparison, in case the name "Joe D'Amato" doesn't mean anything to you right off.

Having thus telegraphed its willingness to stomp around in the most gratuitous kind of sex and linger on sexual humiliation in what I think might be a scene played for comedy, the film thus gets that much ickier when the time comes to kill Jane off - this came as an unpleasant development to me, for her first handful of scenes, I was actually expecting her to turn out to be the real Ripper, since there was no obvious reason otherwise for her to take up so much screentime (and sure enough, she's absolutely not an important enough character for the energy the film takes in building her up) - and does so with a level of unblinking violence that outdoes anything else I have seen in Fulci. Including what might be the single most upsetting moment of eye violence in the filmography of a director who treated eye violence the way Spielberg treats shooting stars. It's immaculately staged, and brilliantly executed - on the level of craft, I'll cop to being in absolute awe of it - but it's so leering, so filthy, and so distasteful in the context of how the film views women and Jane in particular, it's not valuable or entertaining, it's just pitiless and rancid.

That the killer speaks like Donald Duck immediately connects The New York Ripper with 1972's Don't Torture a Duckling, whose Italian title contains a more explicit reference to the Disney character. That film is one Fulci's greatest works, though not because it kindly; where The New York Ripper is cruel, Don't Torture a Duckling is outright nihilistic. But that nihilism develops cleanly from the film's unrelenting social commentary, and I kept hoping, right up to the pretty much indefensible close-up of Jane's nipple being cut in half by a razor blade, that the link between the two films on the Donald level mean that The New York Ripper would eventually turn into something similar. It doesn't; there's the outline of a something about men wanting women to be impossibly perfect, but if I were inclined to defend the movie, it would be out of admiration that it pulls no punches and knows exactly what it is, not because it has any meaningful level of thematic depth or sophistication.

And there's another line of defense, I guess: unlike all of the later Fulci films I've seen, The New York Ripper is actually well-made. Even extremely well-made: it was the second and last film Fulci made (after a gap of eleven years!) with cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, a great talent in the Italian film industry of the '70s, and his depiction of the squalor of New York and the nightmarish corners of it is fantastic; there's a brief scene in a subway with screaming red lights that is the most inspired part of the entire movie, almost solely through its lighting, and a weird sequence in a movie theater where the mood lighting is almost as important as Fulci's staging of the unseen film as a surrealist collage of sounds (I mentioned two great scenes in my opening paragraph: there you have them). So no matter what's going on, the film looks fantastic. And as a police procedural and mystery, Fulci and crew keep the film tight and tense, with Hedley doing excellent work as the bleak, weathered Williams (Malco's Davis - eventually revealed to be gay in a very bizarre and pointless scene that I think is meant to explain his amoral glossing over the dead women - is much less consistent or interesting). That the film eventually follows slasher rules rather than giallo rules in outing and disposing of its killer means that this angle on the film is a bit of a dead end, but it's pretty great while it lasts. Nothing else is, though; I could possibly attempt to overlook everything vile in the film if it was genuinely horrifying, but The New York Ripper is ultimately more rote and banal in its storytelling than it is repellent, and that's the worst kind of combination.

Body Count: 6, which is almost exactly the right number for a Ripper-based thriller. I am not counting the dead body at the very beginning of the movie, of which we see only a hand.

Read More

TODAY WE WILL DANCE ACROSS THE BACKS OF DEAD GREEKS

There are spoiler-type things littered about this review; but boy, talk about a spoiler proof movie...

If Eva Green never does anything with the rest of her career besides take dubious roles in doomed projects and have all the fun in the world playing her character up, down, and sideways as a giant pile of fresh-from-the-oven baked ham, well I'm fine with that. Two years ago we had her as the lip-smacking villain of the sleepy Tim Burton film Dark Shadows, and now in 2014 we have her as the the reptilian race- and gender-traitor bad guy of 300: Rise of an Empire, a film devoted with almost single-minded intensity to showcasing all the reasons why her character is a wretched termagant whose evil ways - and oh, how evil they are - are directly connected to the practice of her sexuality and individuality as a female. It is in response to this character that, in an interview, Green claimed, "It's very hard today to find strong roles for women and Artemesia is the strongest, toughest, bravest character I've ever played". That she would adopt this attitude towards a character outlined repeatedly in the script as the a misogynist's worst nightmare of what an empowered woman might look like goes a long way to explaining, I think, why she is also the most interesting person onscreen by a gap of roughly the same size used to explain the distances between planetary objects.

This second entry in the 300 saga, opening a winsome seven years after the first movie, is some indescribably and unholy narrative chimera that we don't have a word for yet. Sequel it is not, prequel it is not either; it is more like a jacket. It takes place prior to, at the same time as (but in a different location) and after 300, which concerned itself almost entirely with the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BCE, the most famous and storied event of the Greco-Persian Wars that dominated the first half of that century. Rise of an Empire - a film which depicts multiple empires, none of which could justifiably be described as "rising" - makes an earnest attempt to recount the greater context of that war's early stages as it concerned the Greek city-states beyond just Sparta, and in fact it is perhaps slightly more responsible a work of history than 300 was. Which still makes it so historically illiterate that the very phrase "historically illiterate" is almost certainly giving it too much credit. But there are fewer things that are obviously batshit insane impossibilities, once you get over the fact that Xerxes I of Persia (Rodrigo Santoro) is once again portrayed as a 10-foot-tall gilded BDSM enthusiast without a follicle of hair on his person.

Xerxes, however, spends most of the movie too busy killing an unseen (but for stock footage) Gerard Butler to spend much time in Rise of an Empire, outside of a weirdly Expressionist montage narrated by Spartan Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) that lasts for, like, 15 minutes. This explains how he came to be filled with an outsized loathing for all Greeks after Athenian general Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) killed his father, Darius (Igal Naor). The calculating Greek-turned-Persian Artemesia fills his ears with cunning words to trigger war, and it's she who serves as the big bad when, after many years of grousing, Xerxes launches attacks against the Greeks by land and by sea. The land war we already saw; now we turn to the battles of the massive Persian armada under Artemsia's control against the rag-tag Greek ships that Themistokles, still the best Greek military mind outside of Sparta, has been able to cobble together from all the people who aren't entirely certain they want to think of themselves as "the nation of Greece".

It's busier than 300, but otherwise the film basically draws from the same playbook: medium-length scenes of people declaiming rather unapologetic sentiments about how much better it is to die a warrior than live as anything, followed by lengthy action scenes that would only run about a third as long if the filmmakers could keep their damn finger off the damn "slow motion" button. Which makes sense, given that the screenwriters, Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad, did the exact same job on the last movie, and Snyder is anyway clearly riding hard on a movie that he was unavailable to direct thanks to his newfound job as the Joss Whedon of the DC Comics movie universe, but still wanted to bear all the hallmarks of "A Zack Snyder Film". The rules of which were largely defined by 300 in the first place. Director Noam Murro proves to be a pliable handmaiden for Snyder's vision without any attempt to insert his own (his directorial career till now has consisted, in its entirety, of the prickly 2008 indie comedy Smart People, making him quite possibly literally the most random choice possible for this project), and the biggest difference, visually, between the two films, is that instead of golden brown CGI backdrops and digital intermediate to give a homoerotic gloss to the characters' rippling abs, we now have slate blue CGI and DI, and the weakling Athenians et alia haven't such flawless bodies. Though that comparative literally only works with 300; you could still grate nutmeg on Stapleton's stomach, so cartoonishly well-defined is his musculature.

Switching from brown land to blue sea as a guiding visual motif is clever in its way, but generally Rise of an Empire works exactly the same way the first movie did; that is to say, not damn much at all, to my eyes. Post-production 3-D and better CGI technology have generally lead to an improvement in the loving depiction of intestines and blood flying all around in thick gouts that arc across the screen as slow as molasses; it is all the tackiness in the world bottled up into one package, but if anything, the violence is ramped up enough that it starts to become unbelievable and thus magnificently silly.

Also silly: the film's remarkbly, almost refreshingly honest misogyny, viewing Artemesia as a terrifying she-man with sexual appetites indistinguishable from bloodlust (in the film's centerpiece sex scene, she and Stapleton boast O-faces that make them look more like performers in torture porn than actual porn). I do try my hardest not to let Freudian theory get too comfortable on the pages of this blog, but sometimes a sword is just an unbelievably obvious phallus which the devil woman uses to rape men to death for displeasing her in any way, and even if I'd been able to not pay attention to it till the end, the climax that finds her having her cock ripped out of her hand ("cock", by the way, makes an anachronistic appearance in the dialogue - twice) as the hero plunges his own hard steel shaft into her belly at womb-height, forcing her to fall to her knees right in front of his crotch... sometimes, giving up and acknowledging the ridiculously straightforward symbolism is the only responsible way to approach it.

And so, back to Green we return. She adores it; I don't know if she's trying to subvert the staggering bias in every inch of the movie (Rise of the Empire is even more anti-woman than 300 was anti-gay), or if she's just having a hell of a time going unhinged and glowering out of her kohl-rimmed eyes with a look of undisguised, bestial hunger, and indulging in a nude scene (which I would have expected to be way below her pay grade by this point) with madcap abandon that erases any hint of exploitation. At any rate, she is plainly having fun, and it makes her fun to watch; it is the single piece of spice that turns this 300 clone into a zestful, delightful bad movie instead of just a tedious, violence-loving slog. Admittedly, Green is not alone, though she's the only person giving anything that resembles a genuinely good performance: the bulk of the men, and Stapleton chief among them, declaim and gesticulate madly in the hopes that they can somehow deal with the copious green screen effects that they obviously can't interact with by overplaying. Compared to the functionally sedate performances of the 300 cast, everybody here looks not so much like the road show cast as the dinner theater cast, and coupled with the "FUCK YOU I AM AN AMAZING VILLAIN" turn that Green slithers around with, it's enough to make Rise of the Empire zippy and dimwitted in a pleasant way. I do not suppose that actually makes it better than 300, and God knows I can't speak to what somebody might think who actually liked that rather ghastly explosion of ugly images, gorgeous men, and vile philosophy. At any rate, Rise of the Empire is the farthest thing from boring, even if it is also the farthest thing from good.

4/10

Read More