Sucker Punch [Blu-ray]

Born from the creative vision of filmmaker Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300), this epic action fantasy launches from the vivid imagination of a young girl whose dream world provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality. Locked away against her will, Babydoll (Emily Browning) has not lost her will to survive. Determined to fight for her freedom, she urges four fellow captives – outspoken Rocket (Jena Malone), street-smart Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), fiercely loyal Amber (Jamie Chung) and reluctant Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) – to band together and try to escape their terrible fate at the hands of their captors Blue (Oscar Isaac), Madam Gorki (Carla Gugino) and the High Roller (Jon Hamm).

Sucker Punch has Moulin Rouge's freewheeling disrespect for genre, cramming dragons, zombie steampunk World War I German soldiers, robotic samurai, military helicopters, and gun-toting, scantily clad superbabes into a series of hyperviolent fantasies that spring from the undulations of a schizoid madhouse inmate. Sucker Punch also has The Matrix's disdain for the laws of physics, as svelte young women in tight clothes leap, spin, twirl, kick, and crash in slow-motion spectacles that only vaguely resemble how bodies actually move in space. On top of that, Sucker Punch has a video game's disinterest in characters, narrative, sensible dialogue, or sense of any kind, really--anything that might get in the way of the next spasm of bullets and sword slashes. A troubled girl nicknamed Baby Doll (the preposterously glossy Emily Browning, whose china-doll looks previously appeared in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events), traumatized by her impending lobotomy, reimagines her asylum as a hybrid cabaret/brothel. She and her just as whimsically monikered fellow inmates (played by Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung) use their feminine wiles and some kick-ass gyrations to escape… but things go very, very wrong. The relentless eye-candy comes from director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300), whose interest in decorative grime and glistening skin seems to short-circuit everything else. But there's no denying that eye-candy does abound. Also featuring Scott Glenn in the Yoda-esque role of "Wise Man." --Bret Fetzer