Baby Doll (Emily Browning) has been put in a mental institution and is going to be lobotomized in five days. She plans on escaping the facility before the doctor comes to perform the procedure.

I think simply saying that this film was style over substance would be an oversimplification of what this movie is and why it isn’t good. Somehow watching this movie I would imagine that it suffers from the one factor that made me watch it. I was questioning it when the first trailer came out of comic-con, but somehow I decided to side with a lot of my friends and trust Snyder due to his extensive filmography of movies that utilize his style of action to not just highlight fantastic fun action but also tell a simple story without making the movie completely muddled.

Snyder had the problem of taking his overly cool style and thinking that it would be enough to carry the movie. The problem with that is that you end up getting the first ten or so minutes of the movie in slow motion and then random rock songs blaring over the movie letting you know than rather a full blown theatrical film you’ve paid your money to see an elongated series of music videos that are only connected by the fact that from video to video that you see some familiar faces.

Then we come to the logic of the actual film. I don’t know if we’re to believe that all the women of the institution can somehow share in the same delusion that they’re living in a 60s brothel where they have to dance for their bed that night but somehow they do, then the five women that decide to take a crack at this escape plan all end up living the same delusion of being in a futuristic science-fictioned version of WWII and then in the medieval times when dragons supposedly existed and so forth. I just can’t buy the communal fantasy and then added to that is the fact that the lack of character just never makes me care about these women.

A lot of reviews are talking about how Snyder used the sexuality of these women in the brothel to empower them. I guess by all technical rights their right. Their ability to gyrate and titillate is basically a super power since, in the case of Baby Doll it seems, it seems to put a trance on any and every watching and leaves the opportunity for Baby Doll and her band of troubles women to do whatever they want in the real world.

I think the first change that I would make is to skip the whole reality and just make the brothel the truth. Forget the mental institution and really make the story that this step-father has sold this woman into the sex trade and a man is coming to take her away in five days. It serves the exact same purpose and you won’t leave the audience continually wondering why the mental institution is relevant. You can even claim some rubbish that once the high roller takes her virginity – once again playing on the sexuality theme and why Baby Doll’s talents on stage are so ‘raw’ – she won’t be the same which continues to push her to want to escape. However, instead with this constant “deeper” thought that this movie tried to induce just not only belittled the story but made it more apparent as to how empty it is and made it even more difficult to save.

No matter how cool – which I personally didn’t like that much – the action sequences were put together in this film didn’t matter because (as said above) the characters that you should cheering for just aren’t fully fleshed out. The film just meanders and just wants you to believe these women who are never believable.

IMDB says 6.7/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 20%
I say 0/10