Movie review: Sucker Punch **

Sucker Punch  **

Stars: Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens
Director: Zack Snyder
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Neptune Theatre week of Friday, April 1 - Daily at 7:30pm except Saturday 2:30/7:30pm; Sunday 2:30/5:30pm. For more information about film times, call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 110 minutes
Action/fantasy/thriller

A loud, action-packed and scantily clad fantasy thriller from Watchmen and 300 director Zack Snyder.

It’s Kill Bill meets Alice In Wonderland with the kick-ass heroines wearing a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

Teen boys will love it — everyone else will be sitting through a series of fantastical non-sequiturs. There is little logic or narrative thread to any of the sequences.

The story follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning, Lemony Snicket), who is locked in a mental asylum by her abusive stepfather, who bribes the orderly to arrange a lobotomy.

The doctor (Jon Hamm, Mad Men) is due to carry out the procedure in five days, so she must escape.

While plotting her way out, she retreats into a series of fantasy worlds, including imagining that instead of a mental institution she is really a dancer at a mob-run brothel whose virginity will be sold in five days unless she can run away. Her mind first travels to feudal Japan, where a wise man — Scott Glenn, trying to imitate David Carradine — tells her she needs five items to escape, a key, fire, a knife and a map, plus a fifth unrevealed thing that will require a great sacrifice.

He gives her a sword and has her defeat some demonic samurai warriors before returning to the brothel.

While retrieving the objects, she and four fellow dancers imagine themselves stealing a map from the battlefields of World War I slaying zombie soldiers, taking fire from dragons in an orc-filled mountain and getting a knife by disarming a bomb in outer space.

The action sequences are good but never that exciting — probably because as much time is dedicated to close-ups of Emily Browning’s butt as the fights.

There are a string of shoot-outs, explosions and chase sequences in each fantasyland but no humour to lighten the mood.

The ensemble female cast has no depth — the characters wear gratuitous sexy costumes and shoot things, there is no back-story or character development.

One for teen boys and comic book geeks, don’t take your date to this, guys.