Sucker Punch

I won free tickets to an Empire exclusive premiere screening of Sucker Punch and thus got a tad more excited about the film than I should have. I could tell from the various trailers I have viewed that it would perhaps be rather underwhelming but I wanted so desperately for it to be good because there is a real lack of proper action films with bad ass female leads. Plus there are two hot young Aussie actors in it who are pretty cool and everyone loves an Aussie A-lister.
The film began and if it weren't for the turning down of the lights I would acctually have thought that we were watching a trailer and not the actual film. The music throughout this first part was completely unnecessary and really inappropriate considering what was going on. The whole establishing of the film using montage worked for Watchmen, but here it was just weird and annoying. I felt totally removed from this incredibly emotional scenario, and I felt that I needed to be drawn in in order to empathise with what is going on. The idea is simple; a young woman (Babydoll - Emily Browning) is sent to a mental institution by her abusive father, where doctor's signatures get forged and she is set for a lobotomy in 5 days. She sinks into a world of imagination and hatches a plan to escape her fate. In this imaginary world her captor's are the bosses of a brothel and the other patients in the hospital are the "dancers" and prostitutes. In order to survive she must dance, and when she starts to feel the music she is transported to a world of magical, demonic samurai's, a creepy old guru, zombie Nazi's, dragon's and cyberpunk robot's. In this world the girls are ass-kicking, leather clad heroine's who have all the right moves and must recover the 5 things needed to escape their prison. In the brothel world, when Babydoll dances everyone can't help but watch and this is how her friends are able to claim their desired items.
This is director Zack Snyder's first turn as writer, in the past he has adapted comic books for the screen but this is the first of his own stories (he may write more, who knows). The idea is simple and beautiful enough; exploring the power of dreams to survive the most extraordinary situations, and also searching inside ourselves in order to find the tools to help others. The continuous use of slow motion in the action scenes got tedious. The action was very impressive, but after two of these scenes, you get the picture. The dialogue was clunky and obvious and did make me cringe on occasion. Perhaps this was the point but the quality of the production didn't lend itself to exploitation send up. The conclusion was underwhelming and the unnecessary voice over at beginning and end again induced a cringe.
Given what they were working with the performances of the central cast were satisfactory, though I thought there were a few too many teary-eyed facial expressions throughout.
I hate to seem so harsh because the film was very impressive, but so was Avatar and when you look at the film itself and ignore the special effects, it's pretty straight forward and dull.

How did I miss this?

The Grand Moff revealed some clues for the upcoming series of Sherlock in an interview for the Guardian in January.
"You can have three words to work from; Adler, Hound, Reichenbach. Those are your clues."
I have read so many Sherlock Holmes novels and stories since the first series aired, I am so excited about the second series. The first series of Sherlock ended on such a massive cliffhanger, it's been hard to go on not knowing what was coming next.

I seem to always fall in love with the geeky types who have faces I find extraordinary but that others find bizarre. And always the skinny, pale, British types.