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    Sucker Punch

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    If you’re a 13 years old boy," Sucker Punch" will blow your mind. You’ll think this is is as good as movies get, that it's a powerful story about strong female characters shredding the chains of oppression cast upon them by evil men. You’d be wrong. This movie wants to be a feminist statement so bad it becomes misogynist. Writer/director Zack Snyder gets so hopelessly tangled up in his own ideas and boyhood fantasies his pet project becomes incoherent.

    Orphaned Babydoll (Emily Browning) is sold to a brothel (or maybe it's a mental asylum) owned by the cruel Blue (Oscar Isaac). Desperate to escape before she is sold to the mysterious “High Roller”, Babydoll and “entertainers” Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone), and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), concoct an escape plan. In this hellish prison, obtaining their liberation requires them to delve deep into a world of fantasy.

    I won't say it's impossible for a story about a bunch of barely-legal strippers shooting at steam-powered WWI German zombies to also be empowering, but this wasn’t the way to do it. The protagonist may be named Babydoll, she may be dressed like a schoolgirl, but don't worry. She's 20. That makes it ok to have upskirt shots! Before you can raise your hand in protest, bere come the giant demonic samurai, time-displaced Gatling guns, mechas, dragons, orcs, bullet-deflecting katanas, and more stuff that would fit right at home in the margins of your notepad during history class.

    Maybe you think a "strong character" means someone who can throw a lot of punches. That a good villain is a one-dimensional sleaze who cackles while twirling his mustache. You say it doesn’t matter if both the heroes and their foes are flat, that you don’t know them at all and that they’re completely interchangeable? I’d fight you on that one, but I won’t need to. Even if you just want something to watch with your brain left at the door, this won't please you. I'll concede that the action fantasy settings representing Babydoll and her friends’ heists are creative. They don’t actually fight a dragon; they steal a lighter with a picture of a dragon on it. Thing is, no matter how explosive, the action scenes become boring because you know what it's showing is actually taking like 30 seconds in the real world.

    The characters often act illogically (writing down their awesome plan where it would be easy for someone to find) or devolve into cartoons. The special effects look good and the actors do an ok job for the material they’ve been given, but that’s not enough. This script must've been sitting in the director’s scrapbook for 20 years and before committing to the shoot, no one bothered to take a second look at it. Zack Snyder was just so excited about bringing his teenage dream to life he just assumed it would be the greatest thing ever, that we'd all understand what he was trying to say.

    “Sucker Punch” is a bunch of video game cut scenes strung together with a weak plot. There are spectacular action sequences, cool special effects, the movie is well shot, but it's all in the service of nothing. The film undermines its own characters and if you really scrutinize that conclusion, the questions pile up so fast you’ll miss the truly out-of-place performance of “Love Is the Drug” by Oscar Isaac and Carla Gugino. Then, it gets all sorts of icky at the end. If you just want to see hot ladies in skirts jumping around kicking butt, watch “Heavy Metal” instead of “Sucker Punch”. (Theatrical Cut on DVD, April 1, 2016)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  10.1.2016 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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