“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
Okay so before I get into spoilers, here’s the thing. SEE THIS MOVIE. I can’t sing it enough praise, but if you do yourself one favor, see this movie. It is this year’s Scott Pilgrim and Kick Ass.
So
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So the plot of this movie is some bad, traumatic events happen to this young girl. She is then wrongfully placed into an asylum and has five days to figure out how to get out or be lobotomized because her stepfather paid the right guy off. So what does she do? She supplants a fantasy world into her view and begins a cunning plan by some old man in her imagination.
Sounds weird right? Gets weirder. See in this fantasy world, whenever she dances she creates a new fantasy world where she(Baby Doll) and her allies form a team of ass kicking women and fight in various fantasy realities including an alternate World War II, a horde of Orcs sieging a castle with a dragon in its heart, and feudal Japan fused with modern day guns. It’s an amalgamation of everything awesome and as such it creates a wildly visual movie. Now there isn’t a whole lot to say plot wise going on here. There aren’t too many deep levels to it, frankly, and it’s ambiguous when it comes to the stuff you can analyze. It is in many ways the girl equivalent of 300 in that it is a group of five young women fighting for survival.
The acting ranges from fantastically emotive to kind of dull and predictable. The “villains” are fairly one note and don’t have a lot to offer to the plate. Only four of the characters have any development, and two of them are entwined by being Sisters. Baby Doll gets the most story out of this and her backstory visual montage is quite the spectacle. And yet, I can’t call this movie shallow. Yes, it is a bunch of girls in skimpy outfits being bad ass and gun toting and at time there is homoerotic subtext going on between them. But it is in every way about empowerment and improving the esteem of these young women.
The best parts are absolutely the visuals, but even more so is those visuals combind with an amazing soundtrack. Zach Snyder has a habit of releasing movies with killer soundtracks and this is no different. But what is different is that in a large handful of action scenes or scenes without dialogue you have music and their lyrics telling the story for you. So much so that I would call this a new genre of musical. It is in every way an action movie, but it follows so many tropes of a musical that it blows my mind away.
My biggest complaint is A) the third act isn’t as strong as the first two and feels kind of rushed. Sure, it is exactly what the film told us and telegraphed to us via the five items she has to collect in her fantasy world. And B) it wasn’t in 3D. I know, that sounds stupid but when you see this movie, it was clearly a film that could have gained from being in 3D rather than in simple 2D.
So in all, no the film isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely an A-. I might amend this on further viewings to be an A, but this is such a fun adventure that everyone really needs to see it. So get out there and do it now!
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