You can think what you want about an action movie, but a movie about girls kicking butt is unique.

The story starts out as a heart-wrenching silent sequence of events as the main character fights against her abusive father to keep her sister safe from him and instead of killing him she accidentally kills her young sister. This leads the police to take her not to jail, but a mental institution where she is to get a lobotomy so she will not be able to remember what happened or testify against her father. When she arrives she says nothing to anyone but observes everything and everyone.

Baby Doll (played by Emily Browning, A Series of Unfortunate Events) soon bonds with a group of girls there and they devise a plan to escape. Sisters Rocket (Jena Malone, Donnie Darko) and Sweet Pea are on opposing sides when it comes to agreeing with Baby Doll’s plan. Rocket desperately wants to leave but won’t leave Sweet Pea, who is afraid they will be caught and killed. Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber are characters whose main point was nothing but aiding the other three’s escape efforts.

The girls work in a brothel and have learned to dance for customers to survive. Baby Doll is told that in five days she will dance for the High Roller (Jon Hamm, Mad Men), who is actually the doctor coming to lobotomize her. Every time she has to dance the scene turns into the next battle to fight for what the girls need to escape. They must collect a map, fire, a knife, a key, and one last unknown item that will be a great sacrifice to Baby Doll. Each fight for the next item on the list is turned into an epic battle through enormous samurai, dragons, zombie Nazis, and robots.

Music played a huge roll in the moving along of the plot. The movie does a great job of bringing together music with the girls’ emotions. Each song used was a slowed down remake of an already known song. Among them were Eurhythmic’s 80s anthem “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These),” the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” and The Smith’s “Asleep.” As opposed to most song remakes made specifically for films these were well integrated and, for the most part, well done. The battles scenes were generally weak and would not have been as good without the adrenaline pumping electronic music.

One huge failure of the film was plot development. Even if the film’s basic purpose was to show a girl’s desperate desire to escape a fate she does not deserve, there was not much going on. It was a far cry from other attempts at a girl driven action movie such as Kill Bill. Since an action movie powered by women is such an anomaly it is important that it is done well. Sucker Punch is definitely one of the best in its field but doesn’t exactly belong on my DVD shelf.