Sucker Punch

If you like scantily clad women kicking booty in slow motion, this is the movie for you.

Emily Browning stars as Baby Doll - a 20-year old orphan who wrongly gets sent to a mental institution by her evil stepfather. In five days, she will be lobotomized, so Baby Doll has disappeared into an alternate reality where she has been instructed by a mysterious wise man (Scott Glenn) that she can find freedom by collecting 5 items.

However, Baby Doll needs help, so she convinces her fellow patients, Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone) and Amber (Jamie Chung), to become part of the plot, so they can make a run for it as well.

Will Baby Doll and her friends make it out of this horrible place?

Sucker Punch looks cool, and, if that's all you want, enjoy! However, the movie doesn't deliver much beyond the superficial.

Writer/director Zack Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya present wildly imaginative worlds and action sequences, but don't use them to achieve anything except occupying our eyeballs for a short period of time. While creating a film that feels like a graphic novel come to life with a very stylized appearance, characters and dialogue, they forget to develop more of a plot.

Sucker Punch is a big video game as Baby Doll and the gang collect each item, as if that counts as a plot. As Baby Doll lives in three worlds, you can sense how actions in one are supposed to symbolize and impact the other worlds, but Snyder and Shibuya have no interest in connecting the dots, and kind of make us feel like suckers for trying to do so on our own. Shouldn't they be working harder at making sense of this than we are?

Sucker Punch looks pretty, but don't expect anything more.

Sucker Punch is rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexuality, violence and combat sequences, and for language.