Peel back the layers...

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2011)

This review definitely contains spoilers! I find it interesting how many reviews call this movie flat, one-dimensional, girl-in-god-mode, etc.
First, when you tally up the body count at the end, it's just not a very effective god-mode. So that's an incorrect assessment.
Next, why do the characters do what they do? Say what they say? At the base level, Baby Doll is in an insane asylum. The next higher level, she's trapped in a brothel. In the third, she is the new archetype: the sexy bad-ass chick.
Okay, so the fighting in the highest level is Baby Doll's way of emotionally coping with dancing. A way to express her anger, humiliation, passion and fear. Which in turn drives her body to express that. But this is the third level...
So the dancing is covering up, what? What is she really doing on the base level?
My guess is that your mind leaped to the answer and then sprung back a moment. Nah, she couldn't really have been... could she? What could Baby Doll have been doing that is so terrible, so horrifying that she needs to create two layers of hallucinations to cope with it?
And herein lies the brilliance of the story. We as the audience simply don't know what really happened. Baby Doll is a untrustworthy narrator. She follows in the footsteps of Sam Lowry in "Brazil", and The Chief in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Did that conversation really happen, or did she make it up for her own convenience? We can't even be sure how many of the characters were real, other than the fact that she saw them in the theater.
Think about it.
Nope, not one dimensional at all.
With regards to some of the listed goofs: The handwriting on the chalkboard changing between cursive and block letters every other shot... Hallucination, remember? Done on purpose.
And the mini-gun was never shown at full speed. Always in various stages of slo-mo. Even the fast bits were still slo-mo. Seriously.
Oh yeah... the movie was freakin' fantastic!