This movie isn't hurting for big names, either. Lady Gaga, Christopher Meloni, Powers Boothe, Ray Liotta... the list goes on. Really, though, the headliners for this movie are Eva Green's breasts. The fact that Jessica Alba plays the stripper and Eva Green plays the grieving widow underscores just how gratuitous the nudity is, as Jessica does not have the slightest of nipple slip through the entire movie. Every scene that Eva is in pretty much starts with an establishing shot of her boobs - I'm almost embarrassed for her.
As the Dame to Kill For, she uses her unnatural powers of seduction to lure a series of men to their own doom. All the while, she toys with their emotions like a cat with a ball of string. You don't have to worry about her being too hard to predict. She's pretty easy to see through at all time - the character is supposed to be more duplicitous than she comes across. She's a comic book character who hasn't left the the two dimensional world of the page except for her erect nipples.
Falling into her pit of manipulation is the protagonist played by Josh Brolin. Josh plays both an old and a young version of himself, and it's kind of unclear which one has more makeup on. One person who has more makeup than anyone else is the movie's heavy - played by Mickey Rourke. He's got the same face as the last movie - it looks like a catcher's mitt. He's the one we're supposed to be afraid of for most of the movie like a hulk just waiting to get angry.
Jessica Alba has her own issues to work out. Like all movie and real strippers, she has serious emotional issues and needs to work through them. As previously mentioned, unlike most strippers, she doesn't actually strip at any point. She has her reasons for hating Powers Boothe, and so does Joseph Gordon-Levitt. However, the very reason that the first movie was good is the reason this one, like the other Frank Miller failure, The Spirit, was not so good - it sticks too close to its comic book roots without making allowances for the different format of the big screen.
So when does Rosario Dawson show up? Look, there are a lot of sub-plots. Instead of making the most of the characters that you have on screen, Robert and Frank decided to be complex by including a series of stories inside of stories and every damn person had an inner monologue that they just have to get out, and they all talk like a 1920's detective.
Direction was okay
Story was weak
Acting was good
Editing was okay
Artistic vision was excellent
Dialogue was laughably bad
Bottom Line: A swing and a miss. It fails to capture the magic of the first movie and doesn't create any of its own.
1.5/5