You'll be fine as long as you leave your brain at the door

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2011)

I know a good movie when I see one...This isn't one. But you can't really call it a bad movie.
Like much (read: all) of Zack Snyder's work, this movie is best watched with the reasoning part of your head mostly turned off. Just imagine that you're reading a cool comic book and then suddenly that comic decided it wanted to be a full length motion picture. That's essentially how I treated this movie and I believe that's really the only way to fully appreciate this movie.
On to the story. From the trailer, you can tell it's about escaping reality into a dream. The thing is that story is about a girl, called Baby Doll, who gets wrongly sent to a mental institution by an evil step-father. In order to escape the horrible reality of being trapped in the asylum, she escapes by imagining a dreamworld...where she is trapped in an illegal strip club / brothel...wait, what?
Anyway, while trapped in the brothel she comes up with a plan to escape an recruits a few friends. As they collect the needed items for their escape, she gives herself courage to go through the plan by...imagining herself in other crazy dreamworlds where she and her friends are super soldiers and her enemies are either zombies, cyborgs, mutants, or some strange combination of the former stuff.
So in case you missed that, she created dreamworlds to escape the horrible reality of the brothel, which is in itself a dreamworld she created to escape the horrible reality of the asylum...
And here is my biggest problem with the movie. Why the double layer of pseudo reality? I thought the story would be fine if they stuck with just brothel world. Or heck it would be also fine if they skip the brothel part and stuck with just being in the asylum. I think the only reason we even have the brothel part was because they needed an excuse to put the main cats in skimpy clothing (or, most likely, because Inception is still an internet meme at this point)
So the story kinda goes awry when we start jumping between one reality to another but overall, there is a solid plot that you can figure out if you think hard enough. It was a decent story but the character development was a little lackluster. Also, the word "acting" has a veeeeeery loose meaning here.
But the real appeal of this movie is of course the effects. Are the action sequences as crazy as we saw in the trailer? Yes. In fact what we saw in the trailers are just the tip of the iceberg. in typical Zack Snyder style, the action is intense, filled with complex choreography, cool use of weapons, sweeping camera movement, and the ever popular (read: quite annoying) use of slooooooooowwwwwww mooootioooon.
Granted, he does use the slo-mo thing rather tastefully, syncing the action with the movies awesome soundtrack. The slo-mo is bearable here, even appreciated at some scenes. But there was this once scene in the move where I think the slo-mo was pushing it a bit.
Credit to the guys who designed all of Baby Doll's dreamworlds though. The set design, both real and imagined, is excellent. Even though the movie is about escaping to non-reality, at least they didn't go totally into silly cartoon realms by removing all semblance of sense. It's like most Japanese anime: Nowhere near realistic, but not so removed from reason that you can't relate to it anymore.
Overall, the movie was enjoyable. It had a decent story and cast and the effects in the action scenes were quite entertaining. Not terribly memorable but I'll probably want to pick it up when it comes out on video.