Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch

In Zack Snyder's super-stylized action flick, Emily Browning stars as a traumatized young woman known only as "Baby Doll" who is sent off to a mental hospital. She re-imagines her surroundings as a burlesque-ish brothel, and recruits her fellow patients, including Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, to help break out. Writer/director Snyder is certainly ambitious, but the dialogue and story fall short (as do the skimpy costumes). The DVD extras include an extended cut, a soundtrack featurette, a split-screen mode with the director, and four animated shorts.

22%

Beastly

In this update of Beauty and the Beast, Alex Pettyfer plays spoiled high school student Kyle. His cruelty finally gets the better of him when a witchy peer (Mary-Kate Olsen) puts a spell on him and makes him as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside. Kyle becomes a recluse in New Jersey, with only a blind tutor (Neil Patrick Harris) to visit him. He manipulates a classmate (Vanessa Hudgens) into coming to live with him, and of course, they fall for each other, even though Kyle's face is a mess of tattoos and scar tissue. You can guess what comes next. Beastly is a definite cheese fest, so proceed with caution. The extras on the DVD include an alternate ending, deleted scenes, and a music video.

16%

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Bradley Cooper and Zack Snyder were no match for a wimpy kid at the box office this weekend, as Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules was the top earner with $24.4 million. Snyder's Sucker Punch proved to be all bark and no bite (perhaps due in part to bad reviews), earning $19 million. Last week's champ Limitless dropped to third with $15.2 million, while Matthew McConaughey's The Lincoln Lawyer stayed in fourth with $11 million. Rango rounded out the top five with $9.8 million.

Sucker Punch is an action-fantasy hybrid that tells the story of a young woman known only as "Baby Doll" (Emily Browning). In an engrossing prologue, we're introduced to Baby Doll's plight; when her mother dies, she and her sister become the targets of their sadistic stepfather. In a tragic twist, Baby Doll is involved in an accident that lands her in a dilapidated mental institution. Unable to accept her new reality, Baby Doll escapes into a fantasy world in which she imagines that she and the other female patients (Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung) are beautiful dancers in a burlesque theater.

Even in Baby Doll's parallel world where she and the others are gorgeous seductresses, there's still danger from the evil club owner. Fixated on escaping from the theater, Baby Doll learns from a mysterious mentor that she needs five tools to earn her freedom. The other girls are willing to help, and each time they retrieve one of the tools, they all disappear into a second fantasy world in which they're gun-toting, sword-wielding warriors tasked with defeating a variety of faceless enemies. Does that sound confusing? It is. Though director Zach Snyder tries very hard to make Sucker Punch something of an instant classic for the gamer set, all he creates is a messy illustration of female eye candy atop a half-baked story.

To find out why Sucker Punch left a bad taste in my mouth, just read more