At the Movies with Fatwayne

Wow! Most anytime you get punched it hurts. I just found out that it hurts even more when you are “sucker punched”. Sucker Punch in a most apt description of this movie and it can be most painful at times – about half of the time. Whats is wrong with the movie you may ponder and I am here to answer your queries.

The film is set in the 1950′s and is about an innocent young girl whose mother dies leaving her and her younger sister at the mercy of their cruel and abusive step father. Our heroine, Baby Doll (no joke!) is played by a blond coiffed Emily Browning who tries to protect her sister from the evil step-dad’s sexual advances only to inadvertently shoot her sister and kill her. The next thing you know the stinky faux dad is having her committed to the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane. There he bribes an orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Issac) to have Baby Doll lobotomized so that she will not remember what actually happened. Are you still with me? Too bad, you should be walking out of the theater about now.

Baby Doll has five days before she is either lobotomized by a Doctor or has her virginity sold to someone called the High Roller. So, which is it? Go figure! In that five day period she retreats into the deep recesses of her mind and enters a fantasy world where she deems it possible to escape her present situation in the asylum by completing a series of tasks set out for her by the Wise Man (Scott Glenn). OK, hold up just a minute pardner. This new world involves robots, giant ninjas, awesome machines and other astounding gadgets which, when I lived in the 1950′s, were completely unknown to me and those around me. Once again, go figure! Baby Doll and her buxom sisters are up to the challenge however but we are never told how they became proficient in the martial arts much less how they could jump and fly around like rejects from some oriental flap trap “B” movie.

Once the audience suspends its disbelief the action sequences are quite entertaining but as the sayings goes, “all good things must come to an end”, and we are once again transported back to the abysmal mental hospital and the low life people who habitat it. There we are forced to endure the tripe that poses as a movie until the next action sequence comes along.

It simply is not worth it to be exposed to the pimps, sadists, sleazy politicians and risque scenes in order to experience the fantasy world portion of the film. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Rated – PG13  -

Fatwayne’s Rating

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