The Green Lantern

The Green Lantern

Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard

Directed by Martin Campbell

Don't let that brat Judy Moody tell you this is a not bummer summer. Has the kid seenHangover II or Pirates 4? And wait till she gets a load of Green Lantern, a new primer on how not to make a comicbook movie unless you want to screw shit up. Flat FX, smirky acting, clunky writing and clueless direction. WTF?

Ryan Reynolds is all surface as Hal Jordan, the reckless test pilot recruited by the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps to protect the world from evil, in this case the many-tentacled Parallax, a former Lantern who went power-mad. Adapting the DC Comics franchise are four credited screenwriters who, besides deserving no credit, falsely indicate that Hal is the corps' first human inductee. Huh? Back in 1940, artist Martin Nodell and writer Bill Finger created the first human Lantern as railway engineer Alan Scott. Hal didn't show up on the page till 1959.

Peter Travers reviews The Green Lantern in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

Pesky details. Listen, I wouldn't give a damn if this screen Lantern had its own energy source. But not even director Martin Campbell, who worked wonders intro-ing James Bond in 2006's Casino Royale, can get this cinematic corpse on its feet. Here's what's shaking. Hal gets off on playing with his green ring, which gives him powers limited only by his imagination. He goes galaxy-flying, meeting up with 3,600 peacemaking Lanterns, including fishlike Tomar-Re, voiced with welcome sass by Geoffrey Rush, and Sinestro (Mark Strong), a honcho from the guardian planet Oa, who threatens to fire Hal's ass if he doesn't start shaping up.

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So Reynolds replaces his patented grin with square-jawed purpose, stops playing cutesy with his pilot sweetie, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively is decorative — no more), and realizes that his romantic rival, nerdy scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), has been co-opted by Parallax, causing Hector's eyes to turn yellow, his head to expand and his rage to explode. It's an impossible role, but Sarsgaard plays it for real and gives the movie a touch of gravity. Nothing else sticks to the mind and heart. Hal claims that a Lantern's only enemy is fear itself. The thought of a sequel to this shamelessly soulless Hollywood product scares me plenty.

Page One: Inside The New York Times

Page One: Inside The New York Times

Directed by Andrew Rossi

Is print in ashes? or have reports of its death been grossly exaggerated? Page One, a potent and provocative documentary from Andrew Rossi, looks at the carnage done to newsprint by the rise of the Internet, the plunging of ad revenues and circulation, and the firings that left blood on the walls of old media. Granted rare access for more than a year to the newspaper of record, the great Gray Lady called The New York Times, Rossi operates out of the media desk established in 2008. We see media editor Bruce Headlam confer with reporters, including new-media recruit Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and especially David Carr, the gravel-voiced exjunkie whose attack approach — backed up with scrupulous reporting — makes him the hottest print poster boy since Woodward and Bernstein. No one in the Green Lantern Corps can match Carr's takedown of Vice magazine staffers who think they're reporters, the hubris of Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell and CEO Randy Michaels, or even the iPad ("You know what this reminds me of? A newspaper").

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Rossi lucked out by being around when Wikileaks whistle-blower Julian Assange brought the Times secret documents about the war in Afghanistan, recalling Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers to the Times in 1971. One difference, says executive editor Bill Keller: "Ellsberg needed us. Wikileaks doesn't." Rossi does tweak the Times for its arrogance and the internal- fraud scandals involving Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. But seeing the Times enter a future geared to compromise its standards is scarier than any horror film. For those of us who read — on smudgy paper or a battery-powered screen — Page One is a vital, indispensable hell-raiser.

Super 8

Super 8

Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney

Directed by J.J. Abrams

What happens when a kid with a camera finds reality rocketing beyond his eeriest alien fantasies? For answers, catch Super 8, a retro monster mash with a child's heart, a prodigy's unstoppable imagination and FX dazzle to spare. Writer-director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg have tapped their youthful cellu­loid dreams to craft the ultimate home movie, a creature feature built to scare you silly and maybe save the world.

It seems fitting that the director of the Star Trek prequel would unite with the master behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds. Abrams was only 15 when Spielberg, two decades older and impressed by the kid's Super 8 films, hired him to organize the 8mm movies he himself made as a teen. In a sense, they both come from outer space, an obsession with sci-fi embedded in their DNA.

Peter Travers reviews Super 8 in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

Set in an Ohio steel town in the summer of 1979, Super 8 blends the fun vibe of The Goon­ies(story by Spielberg) with the parallel-universe thrills of Abrams' Lost and Fringe. The film's teen misfits are bonded by hormones and a need to connect. Newcomer Joel Courtney is stellar as Joe Lamb, 14, a boy reeling from the death of his mother and the emotional absence of his dad (Kyle Chandler), the deputy sheriff.

Filmmaking provides a harbor for Joe. But he's not the driving force behind the Super 8 camera. That would be Charles (feisty Riley Griffiths), the perfectionist auteur of their zombie movie (loved the crude footage of nails driven into the skull of the undead). Joe handles the special effects. Martin (Gabriel Basso), Preston (Zach Mills) and braces-wearing Cary (expert scene-stealer Ryan Lee) pretend to follow the leader.

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New to this boys' club is Alice (Elle Fanning), a dream girl Charles recruits for the female lead. His instincts for talent are spot-on. Alice, a tomboy about to blossom, has grown a backbone from coping with her dad (Ron Eldard), who hit the bottle after Alice's mom split. Fanning, so luminous in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, shines brighter here. No wonder Charles and Joe fall hard. Fanning delivers a shooting-star performance that takes you places you don't see ­coming.

The "Whaaat!" moments start with a fireball of a train wreck that explodes with sound and visual fury. Later, we'll see the same scene as recorded by the primitive Super 8 camera. The contrast is illuminating. Can you spot a monster crawling out of the wreckage?

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Abrams and Spielberg don't always bring out the best in each other. The clichéd shot of children staring skyward in wonder should have died with 1991's Hook. And Abrams has a propensity for adding plot twists that go nowhere (hello, Lost). Still, Super 8 kicks in where it counts. Pulses will pound and palms will sweat. But nothing works without a human connection. The monster that ate Manhattan in Cloverfield, which Abrams produced in 2008, lacked a soul. In Super 8, Abrams makes us care. This movie, a true beauty, will put a spell on you.

Movie Riview: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class
Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence
Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Just when you wanted to lighten the memory load on your personal hard drive by deleting the X-Men franchise (yes, The Last Stand and Wolverine sucked that bad), along comes this primal blast of a prequel, a potent reminder of what jazzed us about Bryan Singer's first two X-Men and the Marvel comics that spawned them. X-Men: First Class, the fifth in the series, is directed by fresh hand Matthew Vaughn, and as Kick-Ass proved, he's a live wire. In this cheerfully perverse origin tale of Magneto, Professor X and their mutant team, Vaughn delivers a fireworks display of action, smarts and fun, plus a touch of class from actors who can really act.

Peter Travers reviews X-Men: First Class in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

James McAvoy as telepathic Professor X and Michael Fassbender as the metal-bending Magneto are both dynamite. They take roles created, respectively, by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and give them an exuberant jolt of youth and flawed ambition. As Oxford brainiac Charles Xavier, McAvoy isn't bald, in a wheelchair or a stuffy utopian. He has one eye on a hot CIA agent (Rose Byrne) and the other on creating a society where young mutants can harness their powers and coexist with humans. This doesn't sit well with Fassbender's Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor and the future Magneto, who'd like to see humans heel to mutants. That kind of thing can put a kink in a friendship. Luckily, the boys unite against the film's Dr. Evil, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon spewing hellfire). Set in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the prequel dances to an irresistible James Bond vibe that Fassbender runs with in high style (Daniel Craig, watch your back). Did you know the X-Men played a key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis? You will now.

Trouble spots? Too many young mutants means that too few register. But Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss in the upcoming Hunger Games, defines bombshell as Raven, Xavier's adoptive sister, who shape-shifts into the blue-skinned Mystique or anyone else she fancies. Catch her in Magneto's bed – yowsa! Props to Nicholas Hoult for giving a deep-well gravity to the cerebral Hank McCoy even as he morphs into Beast. And January Jones spins her Betty Draper cool into diamond-hard ice shards as Emma Frost, Shaw's accomplice. So who cares about plot holes and a few tacky effects? Go, mutants! You just made this summer movie the badass place to be.

Movie Riview: "Submarine"

Submarine

Craig Roberts

Directed by Richard Ayoade

Like Super 8, this astringently funny coming-of-age odyssey from writer-director Richard Ayoade is set before the era of cellphone cameras. Submarine ups periscope on Oliver Tate (the hypnotically morose Craig Roberts), a 15-year-old Welsh fantasist who sees his life as a home movie, creating scenarios that include his death. There are no monsters, unless you count the leatherboy life coach (Paddy Considine), whom Oliver thinks is shagging his mum (Sally Hawkins) and driving his dad (Noah Taylor) deeper into depression. He forges letters from dad to mum formally requesting sex. Hilarious. Except for a desire to sacrifice his cherry to Jordana (the wonderfully acerbic Yasmin Paige), his pyromaniac lust object, Oliver lives in his head. You can't trust a word he narrates. Ayoade, the British comic making a remarkable feature debut with his adaptation of Joe Dunthorne's 2008 novel, blends mirth and malice with deadpan brilliance.

Movie Riview: Beginners

BeginnersChristopher Plummer, Ewan McGregor
Directed by Mike Mills

Delicate business is being transacted in this touchingly personal and altogether extraordinary film from writer-director Mike Mills. As Oliver, a conceptional artist, Ewan McGregor is a surrogate for Mills. The cancer-related death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), has persuaded Oliver to examine his own emotional core. Only five years earlier, at 75, Hal had come out as a gay man.

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

What did this say about Hal's marriage to Oliver's mother (Mary Page Keller) and to his workaholic father's frustratingly distant relationship to him? Oliver doesn't judge his father. He simply looks back at Hal's late-blooming openness, especially at the passion and compassion that blend in Hal's love affair with the much younger Andy (Goran Visnjic), and wonders why he's never been able to find that in himself. Mills turns Beginners into something more than a movie. It's a collage of collected memories of his father coupled with an art project he's developing on "The History of Sadness" and a tentative
reaching out to Anna (the excellent Mélanie Laurent), a French actress perhaps looking for more than Oliver can deliver.

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At times, Oliver seems more comfortable with Arthur, his father's Jack Russell terrier, who speaks in witty subtitles. What may sound precious in description emerges with fervent vigor and truth onscreen. Like his wife, the artist and filmmaker Miranda July, Mills deals in unforced images and sounds that exert their own freedom. McGregor goes bone-deep in a performance of shining subtlety. And a never-better Plummer is simply stupendous, refusing any call to sentiment as he shows us Hal's resonant lunge at life. Mills works the same way.Beginners is one from the bruised heart.

Beautiful Boy

Beautiful Boy

Maria Bello, Michael Sheen

Directed by Shawn Ku

It's a parent's worst nightmare. There's a shooting at your son's college. You're frantic that he is wounded or worse. Instead, the cops arrive at your door and announce that your beautiful boy is not the victim but the shooter, responsible for the deaths of 21 students.

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

Out of that premise, horrifically familiar from tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech, director Shawn Ku has crafted a film that will haunt you for a good long time. As Kate and Bill, the parents of the remote boy they just phoned the night before to plan a family vacation, Maria Bello and Michael Sheen give performances that rip at your insides. Ku and co-writer Michael Armbruster aren't trying to make a documentary or build a psychological case study on what makes a child kill. We briefly see the son, Sammy (an indelibly lost Kyle Gallner), feeling ignored  in his freshman writing class and later phoning home where his parents can't really intuit his cry for help. Later, we see videos Sammy left behind, raging at a world he claims has "ravaged his heart." Ku doesn't try to explain Sammy. Instead, he puts us inside the heads of Kate and Bill who must cope with the unthinkable. Are they to blame for their son's actions? And, if not, where can they put their rage? Isolated by the media crush at their door, this couple — already on the verge of divorce — realize they have no one but each other. Will it be peace or war?

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Nothing about Beautiful Boy would have hit this hard without two great actors to shoulder its pain. That it gets. Sheen is superb, revealing a defeated man who has always preferred to deal with emotions by shutting them down.  But his son's tragedy is a punch he can't roll with. As Kate, Bello never makes a false move. An intuitive actress of unerring instincts (see her in A History of Violence), Bello has the range to make every nuance felt. Her scenes with Sheen in a shabby motel, where Kate and Bill have gone to hide, exude a shattering intimacy. Bello's blazing performance will burn in your memory. Same goes for the film.

Movie Riview: The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life

Brad Pitt, Sean Penn

Directed by Terrence Malick

Artistic ambition can be a bitch for filmmakers. Mainstream audiences yawn you off. And critics, the bastards, tend to curse out your aspirations to profundity, as if boldness in itself were a sin of hubris. Stanley Kubrick was initially slammed in 1968 for aiming so high with2001: A Space Odyssey, now an acknowledged classic.

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

Lucky for him, and us, writer-director Terrence Malick follows his own rigorous path. Hitting the box-office sweet spot of trendiness is the last thing on his questing mind. The Tree of Life is only the fifth film that Malick, 67, has directed in four decades. But like its predecessors (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World), Treedelivers truths that don't go down easy. No one with a genuine interest in the potential of film would think of missing it.

It's a simple story on the surface. Like the Texas-born Malick, young Jack O'Brien (the remarkable newcomer Hunter McCracken) grows up near Waco in the 1950s. His father – Brad Pitt, in a performance of indelible implosive power – raises Jack and younger brothers R.L. (Pitt spitting-image Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan) with a fierce discipline visible even in rare moments of affection. This father is broken by his own sense of underachievement, and Pitt subtly lets us feel his pain. For tenderness, the boys turn to their mother, given a nurturing purity by the radiant Jessica Chastain. Malick views these lives through the prism of the older Jack (Sean Penn doing much with scant screen time), now a Houston architect reeling from a family tragedy, the death of one brother.

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The script has few spoken words, relying on visual impressions that connect a single family to nothing less than the creation of the universe, scored by Alexandre Desplat with symphonic samplings from Bach, Brahms and Mah­ler. Out of primordial mud and volcanic eruptions, life emerges in the form of dinosaurs, predators and dawning man. Kubrick's 2001FX master, Douglas Trumbull, consulted on the effects, fitting them organically into the tale. But it's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki who links the intimate story to the cosmic one by creating miracles of light and shadow. Heaven and hell, brute nature and healing grace all have a place in forging the world as Malick sees it. Sure, he's overreaching. Most visionaries do. The Tree of Life dwarfs the big-budget guppies swimming at the multiplex. Drown those suckers. Shot with a poet's eye, Malick's film is a groundbreaker, a personal vision that dares to reach for the stars.

The Hangover Part II

The Hangover Part II

Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis

Directed by Todd Phillips

Somebody must have roofied me. I left The Hangover Part II feeling dazed and abused, wondering how bad things happened to such a good comedy. To paraphrase Ken Jeong's memorably bug-fuck mobster, Mr. Chow, "I want answers, bitches." How could a 2009 raunchfest that slapped a grin on my face I couldn't unglue degenerate into a cold dish of sloppy seconds?

Peter Travers reviews The Hangover Part II in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

The first Hangover caught me off-guard. Instead of an avalanche of bachelor-party re-tweets, director and co-writer Todd Phillips raised the bar by leaving out the damn party and focusing on the hardcore hilarity of the before and after. And he found just the right actors to knock heads and psyches as a wussy wolf pack reeling from a Vegas bender the guys can't even remember. From the moment Bradley Cooper, as married teacher Phil, phoned the bride to say that he, his wimpy dentist friend, Stu (Ed Helms), and 

the bride's nut-job brother, Alan (Zach Galifianakis), had lost groom Doug (Justin Bartha) in Sin City, the movie turned a moldy farce into a funhouse. The Hangover earned a worldwide gross of $467 million and the title as the most successful R-rated comedy in, well, forever.

A sequel sounds like a no-brainer. Take the same ingredients, add a new location – Bangkok replaces Vegas – and history repeats itself. Except it doesn't. The Hangover Part II isn't a total bummer. Phillips guides Galifianakis to a few mighty hoots, but it is a disappointment, which for me is harder to take than abject failure. Epic badness exerts a perverse fascination, like Caddyshack II with no Bill Murray. But The Hangover follow-up just lies there, waiting vainly to ignite even with the home-team champs mostly in place.

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

Cooper, outstanding in Limitless, isn't asked to do more than look pretty. Helms, so solid inCedar Rapids, is pushed hard. Too hard. His Stu is now the groom on deck, which is what brings the boys to Thailand. The parents of the bride, Lauren (Jamie Chung), want the wedding on their home turf. Her father, Fohn (Nirut Sirichanya), thinks Stu is a pussy, and points with pride to his 16-year-old prodigy son, Teddy (Mason Lee), a cello master doing pre-med at Stanford. The laws of sequeldom demand that the kid join the wolf pack at Stu's bachelor party. On their one night in badass Bangkok, Teddy ends up MIA. "Bangkok has him," whispers Mr. Chow.

As the guys go in search of Teddy, all R-rated hell breaks loose in the form of an angry crime boss (Paul Giamatti), an angrier Russian mob, a bleeding facial tattoo, a tranny hooker, a sliced-off finger and a monkey with a monkey on her back, that being a nasty smoking habit. Blame, as per usual, can be traced to Alan, who has spiked some marshmallows with muscle relaxers and his ADD medication. Result? Drug-induced chaos in which the guys wake up the morning after oblivious to what happened the night before when they danced with the devil. This somehow leads to Alan shaving his head and Galifianakis walking off with every scene worth stealing.

In the new Hollywood, Galifianakis is the go-to guy for killer laughs. Even with Part IIspinning out of control, he gives the movie a center; he's roaringly funny but also surprisingly touching at making us believe in Alan's need to belong. The rest is manic energy without a real destination. By crowding the film with incident – chases involving cars, boats and bikes – Phillips crowds out the character details that made the first film a party to remember.

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Who's to blame for the fuck-up? This time Phillips co-wrote the script with different scribes whose credits don't inspire confidence: Scot Armstrong worked on the Farrelly brothers flopThe Heartbreak Kid, and Craig Mazin lists Scary Movie 3 and 4 on his credit (debit?) sheet. Then again, Phillips collaborated bracingly on the first Hangover with Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who perpetrated the crimes of Four Christmases and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. The problem is that The Hangover Part II isn't a movie at all, it's just a blueprint for one. To those who say expediency and a rush to a big payday had nothing to do with getting this sizzle-free sequel into the summer marketplace, I'm calling bullshit.

Movie Riview : Source Code

Source Code

Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan

Directed by Duncan Jones

Think of Groundhog Day morphing from comedy to thriller and you'll get an idea of the mischief afoot in Source Code, the second film (following Moon) from director Duncan Jones and potent enough to make us soon stop ID'ing Jones as David Bowie's son. A terrific Jake Gyllenhaal powers through the role of Colter Stevens, an Air Force captain recruited by military intelligence (in the persons of Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) to sit on a Chicago-bound commuter train wired to explode. Sound simple? It isn't.

Peter Travers reviews Source Code in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

Colter is part of a covert experiment. That's why he doesn't recognize the hottie (Michelle Monaghan) chatting him up on the train. And that's why he is forced to continuously relive the last eight minutes pre-explosion until he figures out how to stop another bomb from whacking the Windy City. Got it? Doesn't matter. Working from a tight script by Ben Ripley, Jones creates scary, hairy, high-octane tension. Disbelief? Suspended, until the logic lapses kick in later. It's a small price to pay for a ride that starts at wild and accelerates from there.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff

Michelle Williams

Fans of Michael Bay's jack-off epics will run for the hills at first exposure to this tale of bonneted women on the Oregon trail, circa 1845. No one strips, twitches her ass or licks her lips, except out of thirst. This is Kelly Reichardt territory. The director of River of Grass, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy is a gifted minimalist who believes that the tiniest detail can open up a universe. Just watch these wagon-train women stop to make something as simple as breakfast.

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Michelle Williams, reteaming with Reichardt after Wendy and Lucy, is incandescent as Emily Tetherow, the wife of Soloman (Will Patton) but a woman of her own mind. Damn the dominant men. Emily has no confidence in Meek (a growly Bruce Greenwood), the bearded mountain man who's been hired to guide the Tetherows and two other couples — the Gatelys (Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano) and the Whites (Shirley Henderson and Neal Huff) — over the Cascade Mountains. When the racist Meek captures a Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux), the pioneers are forced to confront their worst instincts and their very real need for a savior.

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I'm probably making Meek's Cutoff seem more action-packed than the artfully surreal Western it is. Reichardt, co-writer Jon Raymond and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt are really evoking a landscape of the mind. Reichardt has crafted a haunted dream of a movie to get lost in.

In a Better World

In a Better World

Mikael Persbrandt, Markus Rygaard

Directed by Susanne Bier

Having just won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this provocative Danish parable from director Susanne Bier (After the Wedding) tries its luck at the U.S. multiplex, where drivel rules. Fight the power. Despite detours into sentiment and preaching, In a Better World is an emotional powerhouse. Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a divorced doctor of torn responsibilities. He frequently leaves his son, Elias (Markus Rygaard), at home in Denmark to work in Kenya among victimized women.

The Complete Archive: Over 20 Years of Peter Travers' Movie Reviews Now Online

That leaves troubled, timid Elias to form a bond with Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), the hot-tempered son of a father (Ulrich Thomsen) turned withdrawn by his wife's death. When Elias is harassed at school, Christian steps in with tragic results. Bier contrasts bullying at home with what Anton faces on a global scale. It's a big subject, fraught with traps, but Bier means to shake you and does.

Movie: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch

Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jenna Malone

Directed by Zack Snyder

Looks aren't everything. Case in point: Sucker Punch, a dazzling visual design that goes tone-deaf every time it opens its dumb mouth or makes claims to profundity. Zack Snyder, who directed Watchmen, 300, the animated Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole and a better-than-decent reboot of Dawn of the Dead, flounders badly in this action-fantasy about babes in bondage. Snyder's script, written with Steve Shibuya, is a recipe for a raunchy R-rated hellzapoppin' that pussies out in this PG-13 safety zone.

Peter Travers reviews Sucker Punch in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

The movie, Snyder's first original, comes off as a tease that cops out on its shoddy but kinky premise. Take Babydoll, the film's put-upon protagonist played with a perpetual pout and black undies by Emily Browning. Snyder outfits Babydoll in fetish gear but provides no character for Browning to play. Just surface. The time is the 1960s. The place is the Lennox House insane asylum, where Babydoll – shaken by the death of her mother – is sent by her stepfather when she rebuffs his slobbering advances. Did I mention that Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" plays with sledgehammer irony as poor Babydoll is used and abused? It does.

Photos: Leading Ladies on the Cover of Rolling Stone

In the loony bin, Babydoll is tortured by Blue (Oscar Isaac portrays him as a sneer personified) with the help of Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino), a dance teacher with an outrageous accent and stiletto heels to mark her personality. At night, Blue helps the High Roller (Jon Hamm, fire your agent) turn Lennox into a brothel where Babydoll can dirty-dance for the delectation of male creeps.

'Sucker Punch' Brings Back the Event Soundtrack: Director Zack Snyder Discusses Selecting and Producing the Songs For the Film

What's Babydoll to do? Bond with other girls just like herself, of course. There's brunette Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens miles from High School Musical), sassy Rocket (Jena Malone), reliable Amber (Jamie Chung) and protective Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish, a fine actress slumming it). Are the girls real or figments of Babydoll's imagination? Trust me, you won't care. Not after they do useless Rockette dance numbers and natter on like rejects fromSex and the City.

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Do the fantastic five vanquish their male exploiters? No, but they fantasize about it. At the first sign of nudity, the censor-friendly camera cuts to dream scenes of the girls in warrior drag going medieval on the asses of giant snakes, samurai with Gatling guns, and the Orcs who serve dragons ("Don't wake the mother"). Scott Glenn plays the Wise Man who helps them gird for battle. I am not making this up. Snyder did, letting timid incoherence run rampant from his head into ours. Talk about a pulled-punch movie. Only a sucker would buy into it.