A Movie of Great Promise and Great Disappointment

Rating: 1/10 (3 July 2013)

First of all, I have to get this off my chest, why the hell is Vanessa Hudgens' character named Blondie? She is not a blonde! Now that I have vented, on to business.
I read many reviews about this movie, most panning it, and I should have paid attention. This movie has three different worlds within it, and that really serves no purpose other than to muddle the plot (for example, in the club/brothel setting, Amber and Blondie get shot, it is never explained what actually happens to them). The action scenes, in particular, are gratuitous and incongruous. They would have been excellent in a different kind of movie; but here, they just do not mesh. I would have probably tolerated, and maybe even enjoyed the movie, had those been taken out (and I am sure they are a sizable chunk of the budget) and replaced with expansions on either of the two other planes of existence, instead of anime style action porn (the overuse of bullet time in a lot of current action films almost makes me wish that The Matrix had never been made).
In addition, I am sure I will not be the first, nor the last to point out that the overuse of blue and orange filters, AND lens flare in films is REALLY starting to get annoying. There are probably infinite ways to be visually creative in film, showing people a slightly different version of what everybody else is doing is trite.
Some of the anachronisms also bothered me quite a bit. I will discount the action scenes, altogether, since I think they were probably only there to draw a younger demographic; but the music in the club/brothel scenes does not at all fit in with the 60's setting of the real story, none of it.
If you want to watch a movie that deals with the serious themes of this movie, watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is much better than this dross. If you want anime style action, that is a whole genre. I just watched the first Gantz live action movie, inspired by the manga of the same name, and it was pretty good, although on some points I wish it had stayed closer to the original (I'm holding off on the second movie because I want to get caught up to that point on the manga first); but as much as the action in Gantz is over the top, it is still way more believable than the action scenes in Sucker Punch.
Altogether, this movie tried too hard to breach an unsurmountable gap. It could have been a decent psychological drama; or a decent popcorn action movie; but in the end it is better to wholeass one thing than to halfass a bunch of them, and this movie halfassed it all the way. I give it one star for copying One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest too much on the main theme that I could have let it skate by on, and yet screwing even THAT up by hitting you over the head too much with the message (Whatever happened to subtlety?).