Sucker Punch (2011)

Plot of Sucker Punch: A young woman, later known as Babydoll, is committed to a mental hospital by her stepfather, who also arranges for her to be lobotomised. The operation is due to take place after a week, but in the interval she recruits a number of other young women to collectively escape from the facility. To do so they require a number of items which they have to collect.  From this point Babydoll fanticises about what is happening to her. She seems to be in a brothel where the madame, actually the facility psychiatrist, will sell her virginity to a rich man, actually the surgeon who is to carry out the lobotomy. In a further level of the fantasy the young women have to fight to symbolically obtain the required escape materials. The scenes involve battles with swords and firearms against WWI German soldiers, Japanese warriors, Orcs and a dragon and robots on a train. At times they return to the brothel environment which is at least in part controlled by Blue, actually the manager of the asylum, and finally to the asylum reality, but will they escape?

Content: No sex or nudity although the young women are portrayed wearing  costumes which expose their legs and bits of their upper bodies. They could be equated with dance costumes. At the beginning Babydoll is attacked by her stepfather who had killed her mother and in the fracas she accidentally shoots her sister. Once in the asylum she is constantly under threat, as are the other women although they are pretty sharp with their weapons, easily killing their opponents, even a dragon.  One of the women can fly aircraft, so there are aircraft involved, in one scene a helicopter in another what looks like a DC3. As time passes even in the fantasy world some of them are picked off. And there remains the threat of the lobotomy.

A View: This film was disliked by the critics, and only just covered its alarming costs at the box office, therefore a bomb. While the director claimed that the film was one of feminine empowerment, one of the critics saw it as “a greasy collection of near rape fantasies”. One of the problems seems to have been that the film was cut so that it could be a PG-13, maybe making the target audience 13 year old boys. I actually liked the dragons which were part of the orc scenario. It is one of those films which promises more than it delivers, whatever you might require of it, so something you might have on for nothing while doing something else. Or if you really want to see young women in their underwear firing machine guns try Transporter 2.

Fun Fact: The female stars spent months training for their participation.