Sucker Punch(ed)

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2011)

***this review will contain spoilers***
Well, it's not so often we get one of those surprisingly interesting trailers from a movie that looks totally cool but nobody had heard about until it's almost out. It's like that special treat your mother gave you out of the blue when you were a kid. 9 cases out of 10 the movie turns out to be a disappointment and this one wasn't the lucky 10th.
The plot in short: Girl becomes an orphan (in her 20s WTF?), girl kills younger sister by accident while trying to protect her from evil step-dad, evil step-dad puts girl in mental institution, girl gets a pretty wild hallucinogenic (aka CGI explosionfest) trip while she's trying to escape.
I can't help but feel that by watching this movie I saw two good opportunities go to waste. The main premise, that the protagonist actually has the strength of mind to keep trying to escape the mental hospital even from within her hallucinations could have made, in my opinion, a wonderful psychological thriller. Just throw out all the CGI and actually SHOW us her interaction with the real world, and her interpretation of if through her acid trip. But that would need, what's it called, a script. Oh yeah, and actors. I mean for realz.
On the other hand her hallucination induced dreams, and by that i mean all the CGI action sequences could have made a nice no brainer action flick if they had been stitched together with a plot of their own. And yes I for one find German steampunk zombies fun, dragons, mechanical giant samurai and rejects from I,Robot fun to shoot at. I'm that shallow.
Most of the movie takes place in a hallucination, and all the action takes place during...dancing destructo-dreams? You can't feel for the characters because A) You know that's not the real them, at least not the mental hospital real, and B) THE SCRIPT IS JUST THAT TERRIBAD that they could have gotten away with cardboard cut-outs for most of it.
So pros and cons?
Pros -As I said before, the basic premise of escaping the mental hospital despite and through the hallucinations did light up a bulb over my head. Some writer steal the idea and turn it into a good thriller please! -The fight sequences are fun. Need I say more? -Music was good too. -Babbydoll is packing an AMT Hardballer. Fans of Mr.47 rejoice
Cons -It's not really a movie, it's the unholly child of a first person shooter and Dostoyefski. Guess what? It didn't work. -Watching women cleaning potatoes in those clothes (or absence thereof) is too much of a WTF moment even for 13year olds. -The ending killed whatever little fun the movie could have given to the audience. OK it was a hallucination, just keep the drugs pumping for another 5 minutes PLEASE. Gimme an over the top escape through fire and brimstone. Anything but what really happened. -You never learn what really happened to people that died during the hallucination -OK Sweety Pie gets free. So, she was in the mental hospital because....? (i'm betting good money on mass murder)
I'm giving it a 5 out of 10 because it does have enough going on to watch it ONCE mostly for the visuals, and also a lot more importantly, it's not The Last Airbender. Oh, FYI, I don't mean cinema once, i mean DVD once. Maybe.
This is my first review I hope I'm making some sense, and also cut me some slack, English isn't my native.