Good visual effects add insult to injury. Horrible movie.

Rating: 1/10 (14 July 2011)

Well manicured stripper-action heroes play out every video game scenario ever conceived. Softcore-porn meets video games meets comic books meets cliché pop- music videos.
I should start by trying to say something positive. Good art direction. That's it. Everything else sucked. The writing sucked, the casting sucked, the acting sucked, the soundtrack sucked, the story as a whole sucked...it felt like watching a very badly done soft-core porn flick with some incredible special effects and set design. I suspect that if you gave the average American 13-year-old boy a few million dollars to make a movie, it would probably look a lot like this.
As one of the first really blatantly Steam-Punk movies, it was a major disappointment.
The basic concept was apparently good enough to dump a lot of money into, but not good enough to be developed into anything resembling an engaging story.
I would just take it as a given that the acting sucked - in fact of all the actresses, the lead is easily the worst of the lot - but it's not just that the acting sucked...it REALLY sucked. The characters were flat and had no appeal or chemistry. The dialogue felt like a waste of time and was totally unconvincing both in content and delivery. I admit, however, if I had that much Botox pumped into my lips, I'd have a hard time delivering lines as well.
The plot? I have played video games with a more engaging and in depth plot - and several with better writing and acting as well.
It seems like the whole purpose of the movie is to play out sexual fantasies. Way too many convenient excuses to play out rape fantasies
Horrible soundtrack. Mostly very unoriginal covers and remixes of what were originally some very good songs. It came off as a really cheap way of trying to have a good soundtrack.
****SPOILER?****** The plot hinges on the leads ability to perform paralyzingly alluring dances, however you never see her dance and her performance gives no indication that she has any dancing skills whatsoever. In fact, you never see anyone dancing until the music video in the end credits, in which the lead character does not appear.
Probably the most annoying thing about the movie is it's attempts at being profound and tragic. It only succeeds by being a profoundly tragic waste of expensive special effects and good art direction.
The movie in general tries hard to be original, hip, edgy, profound, tragic, artsy, etc and fails over and over.