A true disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (7 April 2011)

I can't explain just how much I wanted to love this film. The special effects, the music, the sheer beauty of the sets and actresses, I didn't even conceive the fact this move might be bad. As a fond lover of Watchmen, 300 and Dawn of the Dead I prepared myself for a good fun thrill ride with a simple enough storyline to tie it all together nicely. But as the tag line reads, I was unprepared for what I actually observed.
The film starts very well up until the point Babydoll begins to dance and the fantasies are conveyed to the audience through exaggerated fantasy sequences. I expected them to be of an allegorical nature, each aspect symbolising a facet of her reality, and often found the ties between the dreams and the main plot... minute at best. Whilst these action sequences were fantastic, the rest of the story was flat, the characters thoroughly uninteresting, and I found myself confused by the overly convolute story line; simply waiting for the next erotic or action-packed sequence. And neither came, the move ends abruptly without any real closure, opportunities for fantastic dialogue scenes or intense fighting scenes were hurriedly skipped over leaving a lot to be desired.
With a 12a rating here in the UK, there's nothing very sexually enticing about the film other than some fancy costumes, no real gore or violence and the story line is so weak and inexplicably cluttered that I find the whole film unmemorable. I clung to the hope throughout it may become an artsy film with some deeper meaning, or a tale of female empowerment but every chance to make any such insinuation is passed up, and Sucker Punch, is the utterly unsatisfying result.