Sucker Punch (originally written 6/1/2014)

I will say, Sucker Punch had a really slick, wonderful sense of visual style and really great potential, especially in the fighting-girl team department. However, it was all wasted potential, as it was poorly executed with a plodding checklist of quest items plot, lack of story momentum due to terrible editing and great big lulls between the fights, the fantasy vision scenes were overly compartmentalized and didn’t connect with each other or the real world other than serving to complete the quest checklist, characters were one-dimensional (Oh her name’s Rocket, so she must be the fiesty headstrong one, indeed), one hell of an unsatisfying downer ending for Babydoll, and I’m aware that the ladies were using their bodies and minds as weapons, but the whole movie felt exploitative nonetheless. Like really, of all the premises a fighting-girl team could have existed in, they are forced to be strippers in an asylum. In all it was undoubtedly a great idea/effort by Zack Snyder, but a frankly awful movie.