Black is the warmest color

“They come to the city of sins either with their eyes wide open, or do not come at all” - it sounds about the tenth minute “a woman for whom it is worth killing.” More or less, the same Maxim applies to the film itself: for almost ten years, the sequel of the hit of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, who had reached the screens, seems to do everything so that his viewer still had not had a single chance to cover his eyelids. The “City of Sins - 2” attacks the senses in all possible ways: the maximum concentration of naked and half -naked female bodies per unit of screen time, a completely unprecedented number of deafening strokes in the groin and crushed skulls, outbreaks of a whitish blood spilled here in liters.

This bombardment of the viewer with a concentrate of violence and sex, as if taking it into the accomplices of a strange voyeurian experience, must be borne in mind, is superimposed on an already spectacular Miller style: “City of Sins - 2” is no less faithful to the letter of the comic primary orgate than his predecessor, and again the frame of the frame in an exploded accented flashes of color Monochrome, and the plot is in the quasifilosophical nihilism of the lines of dialogue. However, where in the first film this style seemed expressive and fresh, here it suddenly turns out to be a barely noticeably annoying perception of a monotonous grotesque.

Perhaps the fact here is that for all the seemingly win -win spectacularity of the style and frankness of what is happening in the frame “City of Sins - 2”, it is completely devoid of risk. In 2004, the success of the first film was far from obvious-but over the past decade, two more direct adaptations of Miller graphic novels (300 Spartans dilies), as well as several comic blockbusters, which he affected indirectly: in many respects, it was his hard-fibbed seriousness and intonationally Nolan trilogy about Batman and the dilogy. Sniderovsky "Steel Man." Moreover, Miller even managed to deconstruct the genre of comic adaptation with his own hand, to reduce it to torture visual excessiveness in the Avenger. Here he and Rodriguez narcically reproduce the same elements that brought them success the last time: in the reality of the film there are almost no heroes who did not fit into the dichotomy “ Femme Fatale - a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, the plot is desperately processing fragments of lines from the first film, references to the Nuari rockers. undigested Hard -Boiled cliche.

In a strange way, the “City of Sins-2” is practically delivered by its authors from intrigue-this is a movie that revels in its imaginary steepness, but not very preoccupied with that somehow otherwise, to show this steepness. Formally, over all the main characters-who fell in love with the wrong woman Brozen (Josh Brolarin), a crankcase-gadawa (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a stripper on the revenge trail (Jessica Alba) and her demonic keeper-giant (Mickey Rourke)-constantly hangs out of their movements in the plot is surprisingly reminded by the direct ways. The lines, and even death here contains no trepidation, no revelation, nor pity. Noir in the subspecies of the “City of Sins - 2” (unlike, we emphasize, from the first film), it turns out to be a caricature on himself - the heroes get a lot of suffering, but the movie is in a hurry to distract the viewer from them immediately. And most importantly, in this synthetic, through the quote film you can not hear the irrational, instilling horror to do the merciless fatum - that is, what made the classic nuars by Nuars. Instead, the heels of the coquetle clatter here, on every corner, complaining of internal demons, but not hiding that they have long been tamed and put into trinkets to the color of the dress. Darkness has never been so cozy.