Sucker Punch Blu Ray – Cornish, Browning

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