With more Girl Power then the Spice Girls movie, Sucker Punch is the long awaited film from Watchmen and 300 director Zack Snyder. The screenplay was written by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya.
Bottle blonde and manga babe, Baby Doll (Emily Browning - The Uninvited) meant to shoot her horrible stepfather but instead, shot her little sister. Total bummer. She is promptly sent to Lennox House for the Mentally Insane run by Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac - Balibo) where not just the inmates are crazy - the whole darn concept is.
It's not your average mental institution, it doubles for a kind of cabaret club where all the pretty patients get up on stage and dance for men with money. Fake eyelashes must flow on tap.
Baby Doll learns that when she dances, she goes to a place far away where she is told by a David Carradine-esque wise man (Scott Glenn - Secretariat) that if she finds five things, she can escape. Although the five things are in the real world, she has to go to another world to get them... or something like that.
Joining her on these other worldy adventures are fellow inmate hotties Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish - Limitless), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone - Pride and Prejudice), the ironically named Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens - High School Musical) and Amber (Jamie Chung - Grown Ups).
The quests they go on while Baby Doll dances see the girls defeating Nazi zombies, fire-breathing dragons, psycho robots and the like. You know, the usual shit.
This was supposed to be my bad-movie-drought breaker. Hmm. A sprinkle at best.
While it looked fantastic and had the trademark Snyder-style graphics, everything else felt so disjointed. Perhaps its the multitude of drugs I've been taking this week in order to battle my bronchitis but I had no idea what was going on for the first half hour or so. Baby Doll is supposed to mesmerise these men when she dances yet we don't see her dance at all - just a few seconds of swaying from side to side before she transports to this other place.
And what is that about anyway? Why do the girls have to go there in order to collect items that are in this world? If there's a dude who has a knife and you need his knife, take the frikken knife! Don't go off to Narnia and battle bloody robots! I know it's a movie but still, a little coherence never hurt anybody.
The performances were OK, Cornish was the better of the bunch. For the lead role, Browning's character hardly had any lines. The fight scenes were well done. Need more Jon Hamm.
The costumes were amazing and the soundtrack was pretty cool but felt out of place at times.
I wonder what the test screenings were like...
Was this only in 2D? 3D would have been awesome.
Things I learnt: what ever you do, don't start a sentence off with the words 'what ever you do...'; someone had better put Baby in the corner; remember the double-tap.
Borderline.
Five out of ten.
Must say I totally agree. I was really looking forward to see this movie and it just turned out to be a pile of poo. Everthing was so disjointed and incoherent and just looked like a bad video game. I'll agree the soundtrack was pretty cool as we're the graphics at points. But I found all the characters to be pretty boring and the fact you don't get to see baby doll dance was just irritating. It was just too obvious that she couldn't dance at all in real life!
ReplyDeleteIt was quite disappointing - thanks for your comment :)
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