Sin City: A Dame to Kill ForSave

The film opens with 'Just Another Saturday Night,' a Marv (Mickey Rourke) prologue showing the burly enforcer waking up confused in a Basin City alley with no memory of how he got there. Through the night, Marv reconstructs his evening — he had been hired to protect a defenseless car owner from a group of frat boys who were about to set him on fire. Marv kills the frat boys with characteristic brutality; the prologue establishes both Marv's protective instinct toward the vulnerable and the franchise's tonal commitment to graphic violence.

The film's main narrative is 'A Dame to Kill For' — adapted from Frank Miller's 2005 graphic novel. Private investigator Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin, replacing Clive Owen from the 2005 film) is hired by his former lover Ava Lord (Eva Green) to protect her from her wealthy abusive husband Damien (Marton Csokas). Dwight reluctantly agrees, despite knowing Ava's history of manipulating him. The setup follows the femme fatale archetype: Ava is irresistible, vulnerable, and—as the film gradually reveals—calculatingly manipulating Dwight for her own ends.

Ava's manipulation succeeds. Dwight, increasingly obsessed with her, helps her stage what appears to be her husband's accidental death. After Damien is killed, Ava reveals that she had been planning the entire setup from the beginning — Damien was wealthy, and Ava now controls his entire estate. Dwight realisizs he has been used; Ava arranges for him to be killed by her hired bodyguards. Dwight survives the attempted murder but is left for dead. The middle of the film consists of Dwight's recovery and his planning of revenge against Ava.

Dwight enlists Marv's help to extract revenge from Ava. Their plan involves infiltrating Ava's mansion, dispatching her security forces, and confronting her directly. The infiltration sequence is the film's most cinematically composed action set-piece; Rourke and Brolin's combined physical performances are widely cited as the film's strongest character moments. The third-act confrontation between Dwight and Ava plays out as a duel of wit and violence — Ava attempts to manipulate Dwight one final time, but he is no longer susceptible. Dwight kills Ava with the same gun he used to kill her husband.

The 'Long Bad Night' storyline follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Johnny — a charismatic young gambler who wins a high-stakes poker tournament against Senator Roark. Johnny's victory humiliates Roark publicly; Roark, who has been Sin City's primary power broker for decades, retaliates by having Johnny captured, his hand shattered, and his entire face brutally beaten. The retaliatory violence is so extreme that Johnny is left as a barely-functional shell. The storyline ends with Johnny's death by suicide — a starkly nihilistic conclusion that is one of the film's most-cited dramatic moments.

The film's final storyline returns to Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), the stripper from the original Sin City whose father-figure protector John Hartigan (Bruce Willis in flashback) was killed at the end of the original film. Nancy has been working at her old Basin City strip club but has been planning her own revenge against the man who destroyed Hartigan — Senator Roark himself. Nancy's plan involves multiple stages of training, infiltration, and confrontation; her character development is the film's most-extended dramatic arc.

Nancy's confrontation with Senator Roark is the film's climactic third-act sequence. Nancy infiltrates Roark's mansion using disguise and her dancer's physical training; she fights through his security detail and finally confronts him in his private bedroom. The confrontation features Nancy's reluctance to commit murder despite her years of planning; she eventually shoots Roark, completing the revenge that Hartigan died trying to achieve. The film closes with Nancy walking out of Roark's mansion, her revenge complete, into the rain-soaked Basin City night.