The child of Inception after a long night of naughty, naughty group sex with the Anime Section!

Rating: 7/10 (27 March 2011)

I'm sure a lot of people will dislike this movie because it throws everything at us but the kitchen sink (and throws that too) and its ending. The professional & semi-professional critics certainly haven't been impressed. But I had a lot of fun until near the end and that counts for something.
We get hot babes using kung-fu moves, swords and almost every gun ever made short of lasers is used. There are giant samurai, zombie Nazis, a big mecha suit, orcs, robots, armored knights, a huge fire breathing dragon,all kinds of air-vehicles, a train on a floating tracks, jetpacks, a bombastic rock score, and explosions of varying sizes.
Is it overkill? Maybe. The movie runs two hours and takes a simple story of young women trying to escape an asylum and throws in whatever it can, taking us into not one, but two levels of dreamworld/fantasy in a way strangely similar to "Inception". And since this is the first film Synder made that ISN'T an adaptation, it's the first time he is able to give a movie a moral...though it doesn't come through as strongly as he may have intended.
The cast is game, but they are often swept away in the comic book/video game mayhem. At the top is Scott Glen as the wise man who acts as Baby Doll's "little voice" & gives the girls assignments that parallel to their escape plans. He seems to be having good time with it. On the bottom is Vanessa Hudgens, whose character does little & is the last likable of the heroines and tries too hard to wring out a big performance from a fairly small role. Everyone else falls somewhere in between between. Emily Browning is good to look at with her pigtails and school girl style outfit (she kinda looks like Sailor Moon, especially in one outfit she wears near the end) and she gives an earnest performance, there's something off about her I can't quite put my finger on...
Unfortunately, the story takes a tragic turn in the third act after all the over the top action that hurts it. And the ending, while satisfying (to me anyway) was far from what I was expecting (though to be fair, the film own trailers warned we wouldn't see it coming).
If you just want to watch a movie for a good time & to be entertained, you will be (especially those of you are good at riffing). But don't expect to leave the theater on the kind of high one gets from seeing a summer blockbuster...