Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 42% of 189 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "A Dame to Kill For boasts the same stylish violence and striking visual palette as the original Sin City, but lacks its predecessor's brutal impact."
Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 46 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.
Alonso Duralde of The Wrap gave the film a negative review, saying "This is Rodriguez's second sequel in a row in which he turns sex, violence and exploitation into an occasion for dullness. For a film loaded with decapitations and gun-toting ladies in bondage gear, Sin City gets really tedious really quickly." Justin Chang of Variety gave the film a negative review, saying "Rare indeed is the movie that features this many bared breasts, pummeled crotches and severed noggins and still leaves you checking your watch every 10 minutes." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review, saying "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." Soren Anderson of The Seattle Times gave the film two out of four stars, saying "This new Sin City features the signature characteristics and many of the original's characters but seems less adventurous. It feels a little flabby and self-satisfied. The element of surprise is gone." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film two out of four stars, saying "Sin City: A Dame To Kill For doesn't explode onscreen the way the first one did. Miller's monochrome palette, splashed with color that shines like a whore's lip gloss, doesn't startle as it once did." Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film one out of five stars, saying "It is, in almost every way, inferior to its predecessor. It's poorly paced and repetitive."
Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly gave the film a C−, saying "Eva 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." Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic gave the film two and a half stars out of five, saying "This is a great cast, but with the few exceptions they simply serve the effects." Kristin Tillotson of the Star Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of five, saying "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is worth the watch if you expect nothing more than disparate comic-strip frames of action. But nine years in coming, this follow-up ultimately fizzles." Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post gave the film two out of four stars, saying "The aesthetic quality is still there, even if there haven't been too many great leaps since Rodriguez unveiled Sin City in 2005. But the stories aren't nearly as engrossing." Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "As in the first film, there are judicious stabs of color. And Alba is a showstopper in a fringed cowgirl outfit. But nine years wiser, we know that pretty things aren't always worth killing for." Claudia Puig of USA Today gave the film two out of four stars, saying "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." Rafer Guzman of Newsday gave the film two out of four stars, saying "The movie's trademark mix of live action and drawing techniques (white silhouettes, reddened lips, an abundance of venetian blinds) looks fantastic. If it's depth you want, you've knocked on the wrong door."
Tom Russo of The Boston Globe gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "As usual with Sin City, much of the vibe is about echoing genre touchstones, while the look isn't quite like anything else the digital age has seen." Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "It's a town of bad women and worse poets, where the fists are hard, the talk is tough but nothing is for real - and nothing doesn't add up to much." Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times gave the film a negative review, saying "Punishingly stylized, this marriage of comic-book panels and hard-boiled dialogue has a heaviness that can't be explained solely by its cynicism or lack of wit. It's a blunt instrument whose visual shadings far surpass the kill-or-be-killed storytelling." Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times gave the film a negative review, saying "The greatest sin of Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is the way its high style is brought low -- visually stunning, but emotionally vapid, unrelentingly violent, its splendiferous comic book cast mostly squandered." Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail gave the film two out of four stars, saying "If you showed the Sin City midnight world in smaller doses, as a weekly series on late-night cable television, the slick graphics and cold kink might be more compelling." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying "For those who appreciated Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's 2005 campy, kinetic film noir homage, Sin City, the 2014 follow-up, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is unlikely to disappoint."
.jpg?width=400){kind=small}
