Sucker Punch: In the 1960's, a young woman's mother dies and her stepfather schemes to steal her inheritance, resulting in tragedy and the girl consigned to a mental hospital, with only 5 days until the specialist arrives to lobotomize her. The young woman, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), quickly immerses herself in a fantasy world involving several of the other incarcerated girls, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgins), and Rocket (Jena Malone), with all of them working at the same brothel and escaping into fantasy vignettes involving giant Japanese demon-warriors armed with gatling guns, World War 1-era steam-powered German zombies, dragons, knights, goblins, and B-17s, and cybernetic robotmen, as Baby Doll and company endeavor to gather five items essential for their escape plan. Think of it as a hyper-sexual, violent "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants". Scott Glenn, looking very wizened, is here as resident plot device, with Carla Gugino is the girls' dance teacher, and Oscar Isaac as brothel owner Blue Jones. Jon Hamm also has a small role in support. The director, Zach Snyder, known for his popular adaptations of the stylized "300" and "Watchmen" graphic novels, has obviously watched way too much anime. This is his first film based on an original screenplay...and it shows. It feels like the kind of film a first-time screenwriter would make, attempting to include EVERYTHING they love about film, whether it makes sense or not. The schizophrenic plot feels like 5 different stories, none of which is fully developed enough to stand on their own, mushed together into one hodge-podge of visually interesting elements that don't lend themselves to a great deal of coherence. Also the brazen sexuality of the girls depicted puts Snyder's understanding of human sexuality somewhere just north of Penthouse Forum. The acting is fine, but the girls' use up their glistening-teary-eye allowance well into the second reel. It’s not a bad movie, but I could certainly see how it would be off-putting. It doesn't lend itself easily to accurate marketing, so you just stick with the most readily apparent elements (girls! Swords! Nazis and dragons!) to suck people in. This movie's greatest crime is that it quite simply has too much going on. By the third or fourth vignette, you're feeling sensory overload and are, quite frankly, bored, because the vignettes move the plot along in small intervals and become more important than the plot itself (never mind how a girl in 1960's America would fantasize about an anime-inspired battle mech hopping around in World War I?). I’m sure the director's cut DVD will have even more of the same. All that being said, I liked it for what it was and disliked it for what it wasn't-it's cool to look at, but painfully thin in other crucial areas. Woodchuck sez, "Worth a look…"
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