She throws a mean 'Sucker Punch'

As visually charismatic as his "300" and "Watchmen," Zack Snyder's comic-booky "Sucker Punch" opens with the Warner Bros. logo on the curtains of a proscenium stage. The curtains part, and we see our heroine in a play -- which suddenly becomes the movie's "real" world. From there we enter a fantasy world -- and from there, fantasies within fantasies. It may sound like "Inception," but it fortunately has a comprehensible plot.

That first (or second?) real world is that of Lennox House, a snakepit-like mental institution. Here Babydoll (Emily Browning) has been tossed by her monstrous stepfather, who greases the palm of orderly Blue (Oscar Isaac) so that in five days' time, Babydoll will be lobotomized.

She plots to escape, and in the meantime does escape -- if that's the right word -- into a fantasy of a white-slave bordello, where Blue is the proprietor pimp and the facility's Dr. Gorski (a ridiculously accented Carla Gugino) is now Madam Gorski, who teaches dance to the prostitute-showgirls. From this unpleasant fantasy Babydoll escapes again, into a sequence of four video-game-like battles alongside schoolgirl-stocking'd commandos -- alpha Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), black-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Asian Amber (Jamie Chung).

That Snyder holds this melodramatic narrative together through all these prisms is admirable; that he accomplishes it with the panache of anachronistic iconography that touches buttons but not emotions is a double-edged sword. If you loved the spectacular, history-spanning opening credits of "Watchmen," get ready for the same feel in the combat sequences. Sometimes it's like watching someone else playing a video game, but it's satisfying since they play so well.

With its nobly self-sacrificing heroine, larger-than-life emotions and life-or-death stakes, "Sucker Punch" is a phantasmagoric feast for any present or former high schooler who wanted to escape into a heavy-metal album cover. We mean that in a good way.

Guns, swords and feminine mystique

Before filming "Sucker Punch," Emily Browning and the other young actresses embarked on an intensive strength training and weapons handling program under the tutelage of stunt coordinator Damon Caro and training coordinator Logan Hood, both of whom previously had worked with director Zack Snyder on "300."

"The way they got the guys into the workouts was to pit them against one another, and they tried using that method with us, but it didn't work," Browning recalls with a smile. "It never felt like a competition to us. We would find ourselves slowing down for each other because we liked each other too much."

The only time Browning engaged in some friendly competition with her colleagues while training was when they were divided into teams.

"Mostly, we cheered each other on," she says.

Additionally, she and the other actresses learned how to handle their weapons, which ranged from samurai swords to assault rifles.

"For novelty value I loved the Lewis gun," she says gleefully. "It was just ridiculous and huge, and it would like spray me with gunpowder, which I found weirdly satisfying."

-- Entertainment News Wire