Game - Ryse: Son of Rome (Xbox One)

Rings of power can be hazardous to your elf

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open-world action-adventure game, developed by Monolith and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, an expanded/alternate continuity to both the film universe of Peter Jackson and the book universe of J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps most remarkably, a licensed game that is not only good, but exceptional. Set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mordor portrays the gradual and insidious return to power of Sauron and the amassing of his orc armies, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

The Tower of Sauron sports the latest in the Spiky Self-Mutilation
line, from Obviously Evil Combat and Casual Wear™.

The player is dropped into the leather boots and furred cloak of Talion (Troy "Everyone That Isn't Nolan North" Baker), a gruff, macho protagonist with a gravelly-voice and a severely underdeveloped sense of humour, and a dead family, presumably churned out by the same factory that manufactured Marcus Fenix, Booker DeWitt, Batman and Aiden Pearce. A Ranger assigned to watch over the Black Gate after some misdeed resulted in his exile from Minas Tirith, Talion is assigned with making sure no foul creatures arise from the wilderness to threaten the civilised world, along with his fellow brothers of the Night's Watch- No, no, wrong series. After a brief prologue which introduces combat - through Talion's sparring with his son - and stealth - sneaking up on his wife to give her flowers - a raiding party of Uruks surprise-attack, and Talion and his family are slaughtered in a dark ritual designed to summon a long-dead elf wraith (Alastair "Turian Councillor" Duncan) and bind it to the Black Hand of Sauron, who led the attack along with his Cenobite-reject cohorts the Hammer and the Tower of Sauron. Something goes amiss, however, and the wraith is bound to the body of Talion, preventing him from truly dying and giving him an array of special and often sinister abilities. Sort of an own goal for the forces of darkness, there.

Real men don't use scabbards for sword storage.

The game's plot is your standard 'unravel the hero's amnesia and get revenge on his family's killer' bumf, though with a Lord of the Rings flavour that makes cleverly economical use of source characters while using its original characters to tell the bulk of the story. Talion isn't especially compelling but makes a serviceable protagonist, although more interesting is the elvish wraith and his mysterious connection to Gollum (which feels logical and well thought-out as opposed to an attempt to shoehorn in some franchise faces) and his role in the history of Mordor itself, although he carries the usual 'licensed adaptation' problem that anyone familiar with the lore of the source material isn't going to be remotely surprised when his identity is revealed. In any case, Talion and the wraith's quest takes them all over Mordor, from the barren plains of Udûn to the lush greenery of Nurn, as they meet a host of colourful characters. But the best stories Shadow of Mordor has to tell are the ones you make yourself...

Ugruk Flesheater likes walks in the park, reading, thinks Gondor's
foreign policy is "self-destructively partisan and built on short-
term thinking", and enjoys eating the flesh of his enemies.

The game's most notable feature is the much-touted Nemesis System. Randomly-generated Uruk captains with unique names and distinctive armour and accessories, each with their own fears, hates, strengths and weaknesses, exist in a constant and organic state of flux, fighting each other over promotion, food, bragging rights and impressing their Warchiefs. Existing captains will rise in status (or die) as a result of succeeding (or failing) in their personal quests and struggles, whether they're holding a feast, hunting wild animals, or sneakily ambushing a rival, and other captains or unnamed grunts will be promoted to fill the gaps they leave in the hierarchy. The constantly-evolving structure of the Uruk armies keeps you on your toes as a player, and you need to keep an eye on what the more important captains are doing, because if you let them rise too fast in the ranks you may find them a bit stronger than you might have liked when you do finally cross swords.

The shifting power relationships and unique personalities of the Uruks give you ample scope to put Sauron's armies in disarray. You could just slash and stab your way through a captain's underlings and then slash and stab him until his position becomes vacant. Or, you could 'dominate' an Uruk with the wraith's mind control, gaining intel about the fears and weaknesses of your target captain. Then you could set him on fire, set a swarm of insects on him, or set free a caged beast, and watch him dissolve into gibbering terror, fleeing for his life and losing face in front of all his buddies. You could infiltrate a feast he's holding in his own honour, and poison the grog barrels and wipe out his entire retinue. You could watch over his duel with a rival captain, and weaken him with arrows from stealth so his competitor can finish him off for you. If you're feeling particularly kind-hearted, you could choose a captain or even a rank-and-file Uruk and, carefully safeguarding them in their power struggles or secretly nobbling their opponents, help them climb all the way to the top, and then finish them off just as they achieve all their orcish dreams. This becomes especially rewarding in the second half of the game, when the wraith gains the ability to 'brand' Uruks, which allows you to give commands to dominated Uruks, inserting sleeper agents into the hierarchy, stealthily shepherding them up into the rank of Warchief's Bodyguard, and then activating them at a crucial moment and watching them butcher their former master and take his place. Then, you can order your pet Warchief to attack another chief. Play your cards right, and every single ranking member of Sauron's army could be in your control.

Gubrat the Foolish's patented "nice doggy" Caragor-taming
technique has yet to catch on throughout Mordor.

As uruks gain in prominence, or kill Talion, they will acquire more Power - the game's measure of Uruk status - and acquire new strengths and resistances while losing weaknesses, so even a lowly, rank-and-file swordsman could be promoted to a nigh-unkillable Warchief if he gets enough lucky hits on Talion in a fight. Warchiefs are always the largest and most heavily-armoured Uruks you can come across, but the sheer number of captains vying for power and trying to backstab their way up the ladder means that Warchiefs have to be drawn out through trickery before Talion can introduce them to his arsenal of sharp things. Avenging yourself and your family on the Black Hand will seem like a mere trifle to finally beheading that bastard Uruk who's let you get mobbed by his buddies and then impaled you with a sneaky thrown spear the last three times you've gone after him, especially because he will remember that the last time you fought, he killed you or you ran away, and he'll taunt you about it. This works both ways, and if you dispatch a captain with an arrow to the face, he may unexpectedly return from the dead with an eyepatch on or a bag over his head, grumbling at you for ruining his good looks and having an axe to grind.

"Stay very still boys. The glowing-eyed deathbeast may
lose interest."

You'll be fighting Uruks for most of the game, but there are also caragors, territorial lion-like beasts that can eventually be mounted; ghuls, vile little goblin-like creatures that live in caves and burrow out of the ground to ambush you; graugs, which are larger than cave trolls and look a bit like rancors; and the three Black Captains of Sauron's army that killed you, and who form the campaign's slightly disappointing boss battles, being no more difficult to fight than a particularly resilient Uruk captain. I would have liked to see more of the Uruks' smaller, runtier cousins - the regular orcs and goblins - to mix up the combat a little, but the Uruks themselves come in so many shapes, sizes and colours that it feels churlish to level too many complaints at enemy variety. They all sport Warhammer 40K style aggressive-Cockney-thug accents, with varying degrees of eloquence and grammar, and can often be heard reminiscing on their latest acts of evil or grumbling about poor promotion prospects, unreliable slaves or how the Captain doesn't notice them. Captains with names like "Lashbag Giggler" will just titter and chuckle maniacally instead of speaking, and one charming and rotund fellow, when I had him on his knees and the execution prompt ready, pathetically asked for a last meal, which I found so endearing I tousled the little scamp's bald, scarred head and sent him on his way. You will almost certainly get more attached to particular, recurring Uruk captains than you will Talion or some of his allies, except for the wraith who has an enjoyable line in tactless honesty.

"No fair! Why Uruk not get ghost friend like Man-swine?!"

Combat is very much in the Arkham series mould (by which I mean it's virtually identical): attacking with X, countering with Y, stunning with B and evading with A, and performing special combos with various combinations thereof. As in the Arkham games, you can switch to a ranged weapon - the elf's wraith bow - with the left trigger, and the ranged view and the left bumper act bring up a Detective Vision-alike, taking out most of the colour and detail of the landscape, making common Uruks blue, Uruks with intel green, and captains red. Finishing moves are plentiful and visceral, and you'll probably never tire of the metallic squelching that comes with sliding your longsword through an Uruk's guts before booting him off of it and turning to your new target. Especially gruesome (in a delightful way) are the beheadings, not just for the way that the Uruk's head sails into the air in slow motion, pained shock or dumb gormlessness written all over their faces, but for the sense of achievement they bring: plenty of Captains you kill by whatever means will not come back, but when you cut their heads off, you know they're gone for good, and if they've been a thorn in your side for a long time, it's all the more satisfying to put them to rest permanently.

Uruks hate their campfire sing-songs of 'Kum Ba Yah' being
interrupted.

Talion is much squishier than the armoured Master Wayne, however, and it's very easy to become overwhelmed in combat with multiple Uruks, especially if there are spearmen and archers outside the melee, who will have no qualms about firing into the crowd to try and take you down, and because it's possible to attract twenty or more Uruks to a single brawl, you may well lose track of who exactly is attacking you and when. You're perfectly capable of taking on legions of Uruks while suffering nary a scratch, but the addition of captains and shielded enemies that are immune to particular attacks or can counter you in return encourage you to mix up your tactics and not charge headlong into prolonged encounters. Getting hit even once can throw you off your rhythm, making it more likely that you'll be hit again and, what's more, cancelling your combo and denying you access to the special moves you can only activate once you reach a certain number of hits. Useful weapon-upgrading runes that are dropped by slain captains can allow you to regain health when using execution takedowns and other little bonuses, which do make a material difference to how you engage in combat and allow you to feel markedly stronger, but never provide so much utility that you become untouchably overpowered.

"Ah yes, 'Ringwraiths'. We have dismissed that claim."

The free-roaming aspect of the game provides the usual glut of collectible objects, sidequests, unlockable abilities and upgradable weapons, as well as slaves to rescue, wild beasts to hunt and herbs to pick for the game's Hunting and Survival challenges. Talion can scale buildings and sheer cliff-faces Ezio-style, meaning there are no real barriers to going wherever you want, and allowing a breadth of tactical options for how to approach a mission or assassination of a troublesome captain. There are special challenges that Talion can undertake that test his swordsmanship, his stealth or his archery, which eventually reforge and upgrade his longsword, dagger and bow respectively. The two maps (Udûn and Nurn) are large enough to allow plenty to do without cramping it all up, but small enough that the commute from one side to the other never becomes tedious. It's all immensely diverting and adds up to plenty of things to do when you've polished off the campaign, although the freeform nature of the game can sometimes work against it. For example, by the time I started the early missions that introduce the concept of the Nemesis System by having you clear the way for the incompetent Uruk Ratbag to become a Warchief, I'd already been doing plenty of exploring on my own for several hours and was intimately familiar with how the system worked, and certainly not in need of a tutorial extended over five missions or so explaining it to me.

Like most free-roaming games, Shadow of Mordor is strongest when it tosses you a bunch of tools, drops you in a sandbox and lets you mess around to your heart's content. Eliminating particularly irritating captains, assembling an army of branded Uruks and generally playing around with the Nemesis System is far more involving than the main amnesiac revenge-by-numbers campaign, though this is bolstered by pleasing and context-appropriate cameos from characters like Gollum and Saruman the White, and piecing together the wraith's history and his wider role in Middle-Earth lore is significantly more interesting than main character Talion's tired motivations. With excellent replayability, fun and diverse side activities, simple but satisfying and elegant combat, impressive visuals and a brilliant innovation in the Nemesis System, Monolith's Shadow of Mordor uses a familiar license to break new ground while remaining faithful to the source material and being tremendous fun to boot.

8.5/10 - Fine combat, fun enemies, great adventure, and MY AXE! Er, sorry.

Game - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)

Snake? Snake?! SNNAAAAAAAKE!!

Never having played a game in the Metal Gear series before this – I know, I’m a heretic – except for an extremely brief flirtation with, I think, Metal Gear Solid on a PlayStation emulator and a go at the demo for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where I took issue with the silly made-up word adorning the title and a control scheme I found somewhat unintuitive to say the least, I was only vaguely sure of what to expect from Ground Zeroes. I knew enough to be aware that the general plot of the series is about as easy to get a grip on as a greased ferret at a foam party for the National Prosthetic Hands Society, and a few visits to each game's relevant Wikipedia pages and some aspirin later I was forced to concede defeat to the impenetrably tangled Japanese Knotweed infestation that is Hideo Kojima's writing. 

The plot concerns two of Snake's allies from Peace Walker, Chico and Paz, who have been kidnapped by a mysterious Black Ops group and are being held at a black site prison camp in Cuba. Head of the MSF, Big Boss, formerly known as the original Snake, (Kiefer Sutherland replacing series stalwart David Hayter as VA) goes in under cover of night and rain to get them out. Having done so, by way of more or less faffing about depending on the player, Snake evacs the pair by helicopter, whereupon he has to rummage around in Paz' guts to extract a bomb placed there by villain Skullface. Almost immediately afterwards, she reveals that she has a second bomb inside her (Where, you ask? The game doesn't want you to know, and I don't think I want to know either) and leaps out of the helicopter and explodes. It's a fairly short single mission making up the game's story campaign, although individual playstyle will make some difference. There are several bonus Side Ops after the main mission, although all of them take place in the same location at differing times of day.

"No, I won't kill you. Not before I've shown you my Kurt Russell
impression."

I can’t really comment on the replacement of David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland, but Hayter’s reported Twitter antics would hint that either he does have a secret role in The Phantom Pain, or he’s taking his replacement in good spirits, or he’s just gone looney. Sutherland says very little, all told, in the Ground Zeroes campaign and even less, verging on nothing, for most of the Side Ops. Primary voice acting honours therefore fall to Robin Atkin Downes (Halo 2's Prophet of Regret and Saints Row the Third and IV's British Player Voice) as Kazuhira 'Kaz' Miller, one of Big Boss/Snake's closest allies at the MSF. Also making up the colourful cast is Skullface, a mysterious agent who seems to literally have a skull for a face (subtle), and probably couldn't be more obviously evil if he were voiced by Tim Curry and walked onto the scene with ten puppies skewered on a broadsword.

Even with special goggles and years of training, Snake still
can't see what the hell is going on with this series' plot.

Honestly, I have a hard enough time trying to understand the Snake Family Tree of clones, alternate names, codenames and titles, and that's before I try and understand how they all fit into the plot. I think I understand that Big Boss used to go by 'Snake' when he worked for The Boss who became a traitor and died except she was actually a double agent who didn't really defect who was kept alive as the AI for a Metal Gear and Snake was the one who killed her while he was calling himself Naked Snake, and Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake are all in some way clones of the original Snake who is now called Big Boss except for when he's sometimes called Snake or Punished Snake or Venom Snake and was the bad guy of the very first game which was just called Metal Gear and he's also the rival of Major Zero who is also called Cipher which is also the name of the organisation that he formed in opposition to the MSF and oh no I've gone cross-eyed. Enjoy the gameplay by all means, but if you're going to try and actually understand the plot to this series you should come prepared with several flowcharts and timelines worked out, and probably a few grams of whatever Kojima was smoking as well.

Gameplay-wise, MGS V: GZ feels like a newer and fresher take on the series. Granted, the last MGS I played was the first one, but it certainly felt to me that the control of SnakeBoss was much tighter and more responsive than I might have expected. Many stealth games that are all about stealth and evasion, like most of the Splinter Cell series before Conviction (which probably went too far the other way, to be honest) or the Hitman games before Absolution, tend to deliberately punish the player for arsing up the stealth by having unresponsive or awkward combat, where the best thing to do is perch yourself on one side of a doorway with your gun arm protruding through and shooting the enemy as they line up at the door one-by-one until you've emptied the map of them and can go about your sneaky business with impunity (anyone who's ever started a firefight on Blood Money's 'Curtains Down' level will be intimately familiar with this technique). Ground Zeroes' shooting isn't Gears of War, or even Hitman: Absolution, but the shooting is responsive enough; the limited roster of weapons have some real heft to them; and there's always the option to shoot a dead guard until you've turned him red all over, which should please fans of GoldenEye or Perfect Dark who have all tried this many times without exception.

You can't see these guys' faces, so they must be the villains.

However, Ground Zeroes is short, and I do mean short. I have probably spent more time in a single level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory than I have in this game's entire story mode. It would probably take more time to read the Wikipedia summary of the rest of the series' plots than to complete Ground Zeroes' story mission. I have generally worked on a per hour scheme for working out if a game is worth my money. If I spend more hours playing it then I spent pounds to get it, it must have been worth the price – you will notice that films, whether on DVD or at the movies, do not even approach this level of fiscal efficiency (books, on the other hand, must therefore be some of the most cost-efficient things you can buy). Well, the entire solitary mission that composes this game’s story mode could probably take you as little as ten minutes or as much as ten hours depending on how stealthy, methodical or downright silly you feel like being. If you're feeling particularly emergent, you could probably knock out all fifty or so guards, drag them onto a helipad, pile them around a mountain of fuel barrels and blast them all hundreds of feet into the air like corpse confetti. I went into Ground Zeroes knowing it was short, and come the end of the story mode, even with all the side missions still to do and multiple achievements still to get, I still felt a little as though I'd just played a rather expansive demo and I would rather like the full game now, please, if you don't mind. It takes a bit of an adjustment, and I certainly wouldn't like to see every fairly large game that gets released from now on try the same tactic, but I can certainly recommend Ground Zeroes as an investment, provided you don't pay too much for it. Get it pre-owned or just wait a little for it to come down would be my advice, but it's certainly a fun stealth-'em up while it lasts.

Insert your own exclamation mark and BWING sound here.

Perhaps with this shortness of story in mind, the game’s achievements have been designed to extract as much value as possible from the game itself. Achieving an S-rank on the main mission and all the Side Ops – likely to be the most difficult achievement Ground Zeroes offers – will probably take more than whatever amount you paid for this game in hours to complete on its own, requiring obsessive plays and replays at varying speeds with varying levels of stealth to work out where the main objectives are; where any side targets or missions can be found; where guards will be and when; which guards need to be knocked out, which need to be avoided, and which won’t get near enough to bother you at all; and what combination and order of managing all these elements will nab you the highest point score while minimising penalties. You could hoof those optional prisoners over to the LZ on your back for a tasty 4000 points each, but it could add an extra ten minutes onto your time, and each to-and-fro trip increases the chance of those guards you avoided spotting you or the ones you knocked out returning to groggy consciousness and sticking an M16 barrel up your jaxie and blowing your colon out through your stupid eye-patch while you practice your fireman’s lift. And even if they don’t notice you specifically, your attempt at stealth could still be shot to buggery by the slightly daffy allied helicopter AI, which likes to indulge in a cover-blowing scenic flyby of the entire prison camp almost every time it dusts off.

Like any 'B-List' or 'C-List' type game that is competent and even fun, but never original - the sort of thing you'd never heard of before you see it on the shelf temptingly priced at £4.99 - your opinion of Ground Zeroes is likely to be influenced mainly by how much you pay for it, and the kind of expectations you have going in. If you want an epic, sprawling sandbox, or a devilishly intricate and punishing stealth experience, you probably won't find it here in exactly the form you want. But get Ground Zeroes cheap, and play it a lot, and you will probably discover a satisfying, unpolished gem of a game. It's obviously intended to be a small but tantalising appetiser to The Phantom Pain, and if it's going to be like this, all I can say is: bring on the main course.

7/10 - A Solid entry in the series, but certainly not the Big Boss.

Game - Batman: Arkham Origins - Cold, Cold Heart (DLC) (Xbox 360)

Freeze a jolly good fellow...

The second and superior piece of story DLC for Arkham Origins, Cold, Cold Heart serves as the Arkhamverse's introduction to one of Batman's best and also most ridiculous villains: scientist Victor Fries, known to the citizens of Gotham as Mister Freeze. Batman must spring into action to rescue a friend and solve an icy-hearted crime as cold-empowered thugs and a man in a cryogenic suit attack a charity gala hosted at Wayne Manor, claiming to have a score to settle with Bruce's old pal and fellow one percenter Ferris Boyle (Get it?! Fries! Boyle! Aren't we subtle!?), whom they violently attack. Origins' younger, brasher Batman comes to the fore here as an enraged Wayne swears vengeance on the depraved degenerates who would dare attack such a paragon of the milk of human kindness and decency as Ferris Boyle.

Not pictured: the five gallons of sweat Bruce has to pour out of his
boots after stomping around a burning building in this thing.

The plot is well-written and full of plenty of twists and turns as you might expect from an Arkhamverse game but - and it's a 'but' so large that Jennifer Lopez' pants don't fit it - there is absolutely nothing here that is going to surprise you if you have seen or are even vaguely familiar with the Batman: The Animated Series episode 'Heart of Ice', which won an Emmy for its nuanced and emotional reinvention of what had previously been one of the Caped Crusader's lamer villains, and with only twenty minutes instead of this DLC campaign's four or so hours. And even that time is padded time: with the final room of the GothCorp building - Mr Freeze's boss arena - blocked off by a thick wall of ice, the Dark Knight is forced to schlep over half of Gotham to find the pieces of a special drill that Penguin's men have captured and, for reasons best known to themselves, disassembled and spread over the city. Why the drill is the only one apparently in existence and another can't be found in, say, an R&D lab in the headquarters of the corporation that manufactures it, which also conveniently happens to be half-frozen at the time, I don't know. Oh, wait, plot convenience is anathema to free-roaming game design, right. I mean, what's the point of giving them a whole borough of the city to explore if we don't come up with some paper-thin reason to drag them all over it?

"Hey, that guy fights just like Batman! And he has access to
incredible resources and technology, just like Batman! What
a coincidence!"

In fact, the game is perfectly happy itself to provide you with a better reason to cover so much superfluous ground, in some additions to the Arkham series' well-ridden old warhorse of collectibles. Alongside the more pedestrian Anarky tags, there's some nicely in-character and lore-appropriate 'collectibles' to be found: police officers who've gotten in the way of Freeze or his men's objectives and been frozen solid in blocks of ice. Never mind that this sort of freezing would almost certainly result in fatal suffocation - and then fatal hypothermia if it didn't - it feels nicely old-school to be busting Freeze's victims out of man-sized icicles like in Batman: Vengeance or just about any of Freeze's appearances (even *shudder* Batman & Robin).

Mister Freeze, his wife, and everywhere he goes are all frozen,
but he just can't let it go.

One of the new features of  Arkham Origins is Batman's bulky, padded Heat Suit, which enables him to survive the cryogenic temperatures of Mr Freeze's renovations in GothCorp, as well as resist his and his goon's freeze rays, and use the specially-installed Heat Gauntlets (basically a re-skin of the Electrified Gauntlets from the base game) to release frozen guards and bust through enemy shields and armour as before. One nice touch of the suit that stops it from being just a palette swap - aside from the added bulk and height - is the sound design. Batman's footsteps are heavier, and he speaks through an electronic filter now that the cowl completely covers his lower jaw as well - a nice touch is that Batman's inner monologue and voice when he speaks to Alfred is slightly muffled, as it must sound inside the helmet, but is fully electronic when he speaks to enemies or other characters around him. The 'interactive' crime scenes return as Batman enters a flash-frozen lab at the core of GothCorp, discovering a guard dead of heatstroke on the threshold of the freezing lab, a strange machine that seems to have exploded from the inside, and a few strange assortments of cryogenic technology. As Arkham Origins crime scenes go, it's quite a good 'un, and there's plenty of scope for witnessing the carnage that gave birth to Mister Freeze from every conceivable angle, and there's the same satisfaction to be had as in the main game of peeling back the layers and revealing the truth of the guilty party - in this case, colossal asshat Ferris Boyle, who promised Victor he'd find a cure for his wife's Huntington's, provided Victor make weapons for GothCorp against his conscience, and then promptly welshed on the deal in the way that rich industrialists in comic books who aren't Batman tend to do.

"It was you! You stole my goggles!"
"Uh, boss, we all did."

Initiation was really just a re-skin of Batman and his enemies, with a couple of new maps thrown into the challenge mode and a few curious design choices, even if they do make the game easier (wooden grappling gun? Really?). By contrast, Cold, Cold Heart is truly its own beast, featuring several new character models and environments, including an impressive introduction where you play as a suitless Bruce Wayne fighting to get to the Batcave through a burning Wayne Manor (Wayne Manor is the Jean Grey of the DC Universe, isn't it? No matter the continuity, it seems to burn down at some point). Unfortunately, it's not really a disadvantage to be robbed of your equipment - sure, you have less health and gadgets in the fight scenes, but those hardly make a difference when you're still built like a brick privy and faster than Jeremy Clarkson when there's a sale on Denim. The one stealth section that could genuinely have been challenging without your suit and toys is woefully simplistic, with a grand total of 3 guards, the first two of whom are programmed to stand stock still next to each other as you walk up and smash their heads together like cymbals, and the third who somehow won't hear the bony crack behind him, or indeed budge an inch from the spot his feet have apparently been glued to, facing comfortably away from you near the exit door. The final battle with Mister Freeze, similarly, falls tantalisingly short of the greatness of the similar fight in Arkham City. Instead of the AI of Mister Freeze, here all you have to worry about is the scarcity of available methods for hurting him - prepare to find yourself laboriously timing stalactites to drop on his head and jumping out of vents onto him a lot - and the constantly respawning goons who turn up all over the arena like a bad smell stuck to a bad penny, as well as the extremely few vantage points to escape to, make evading the enemy once you've been spotted an irritating chore of repetitive swinging, especially when Freeze starts icing the damn things.

Like the game that spawned it, Cold, Cold Heart falls just short of greatness. The use of the Batman mythology, characters, dialogue, visuals and sound are spot-on as ever, but drawn-out fetch quests, hit-and-miss game mechanics and a plot as predictable as the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest often threaten to render the game stale beyond the preserving power of any freeze ray.

6/10 - I'm not sending it to the cooler.

Game - Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman pulls another dark all-nighter

Batman: Arkham Origins is the third game in Warner Brothers' successful Arkhamverse Batman games, and a prequel to Rocksteady's stellar and genre-defining stealthy-beat-'em-up-platform-riddlers that proved once and for all (even if no-one else has successfully followed up on it) that you can make excellent licensed games. Once again, Batman manages to accomplish a frankly improbable amount of things over the course of a single night, as the story sees a younger iteration of the Dark Knight on the run from an elite cadre of assassins hired by Black Mask competing for the million dollar bounty for his head on the longest Christmas Eve of all time.

It's heartwarming to see that being over fifty years old with
one eye and no depth perception is no barrier to a successful
career in contract killing.

Taking his vocal cues from Kevin Conroy's practically definitive take on the character, Roger Craig Smith  is a younger, rougher-around-the-edges Batman who doesn't quite know his own strengths and limits yet - witness him giving into his anger and knocking out a henchman before he's actually finished interrogating him  - and this is reflected in his design: more aggressive and less confident in his ability to avoid harm, Wayne opts for a more heavily-armoured look than the streamlined appearance of his wiser, more confident self in Arkham Asylum.  The game meticulously shows the inception and development of the qualities of morality, stubbornness, determination and trust that will go on to characterise him and his relationship with his allies in all future games of the series. As Origins is set before Batman was more-or-less endorsed by Jim Gordon and the Gotham City Police Department, and Gordon still very much wants to bring him in, even considering him the police's highest priority in a city swarming with much more dangerous whackjobs and psychos, it falls to Wayne's stalwart valet Alfred, voiced by noted English actor Martin Jarvis reprising his role from Arkham City, to act as the heart and steadying conscience of the impulsive, angrier Wayne that Origins portrays. Origins puts Alfred's almost parental role in much greater focus than previous games, showing an Alfred still unconvinced of the wisdom of this 'Batman' phase that his young ward seems to be going through, who disagrees with the danger Bruce puts himself in and sometimes flat-out tries to stop him, but ultimately comes round when convinced by the danger posed by the criminals running Gotham and the strength and resilience of the young man he's watched grow from a small, lonely boy.

"Screw the rules, I have green hair!"

As ever, the Joker dominates proceedings once he shows his pasty face, but unlike the previous two games it doesn’t feel justified. Even in City, the Clown Prince’s predominance rather short-changes Hugo Strange and Ra’s Al Ghul from their main villain roles, even though the Joker is really only the villain of the B-plot. However, in that game it was mostly justified by the history on show between the characters, the extension of their relationship in the previous game, and the fact that it’s the character’s swan-song – or at least Mark Hamill’s, who as far as many people are concerned is the character. The Joker is written very well in Origins, and Troy Baker does an excellent job as a slightly younger Hamill-Joker, maintaining all of the psychotic humour and mood swings while also demonstrating that the criminal, like Batman, is still finding his feet in Gotham at this stage. However, once again he is essentially a B-plot villain here who hijacks the A-plot away from its real villains and, unlike in City, he does it in such a way that it is detrimental to the story rather than complimentary. “Eight of the world’s best assassins hunt Batman on Christmas Eve” was the oft-repeated elevator pitch for Origins, and it just brimmed with promise and potential, but once the Joker shows up that story is mainly forgotten. What could have been an insightful examination into The Long Halloween’s conception that it is actually Batman’s presence in Gotham that allows the colourful rogues and psychos to crawl out of the woodwork and dominate the more regular criminals like the Falcones and the Maronis, is instead just an excuse to show Batman’s first encounter with some recognisable B-listers from his Rogues’ Gallery, and most of the resonance of these meetings is squandered as they have to be swiftly dealt with to move onto the next celebrity guest. 

Roman Sionis prepares to re-enact his favourite scene from
Saturday Night Fever.

Black Mask is a character that creates a lot of potential, as he represents a sort of transitory phase between the ‘legitimate’ criminals like Falcone and the gimmicky loons like Joker, but once it’s revealed that this Black Mask was actually just the Joker in disguise, the genuine article isn’t used at all except in a missable side-quest. The first assassin, Killer Croc, is dealt with in the prologue at Blackgate before Bruce even knows he’s being hunted. Electrocutioner, a D-list (at best) Batman villain even I hadn’t heard of before this, is used fairly well but essentially as comic relief, going down to a single hit after a hilariously overblown ‘boss fight intro’ cinematic and later being killed by the Joker in a fit of pique without ever being encountered by Batman again. His main impact on the game is simply to provide the ludicrously broken Electro-gauntlets that make virtually every fight you get to use them in about as easy as putting on a hat. Deathstroke is fairly effective, although that’s mainly because he gets the honour of the first Arkham series boss fight that’s actually good, and after that he is imprisoned and forgotten. Garfield Lynns, aka Firefly, turns up at the end after a protracted mysterious absence from the plot to drag out the third act and provide such a long interruption to Batman’s attempt to return to Wayne Manor as Bane attacks it that I refuse to believe Alfred isn’t dead and the Manor isn’t ashes by the time he finally gets back there – his bossfight, sadly, returns somewhat to the repetitive grind that was Poison Ivy’s battle in Asylum. Deadshot and Lady Shiva can be easily missed here, only fought in well-hidden side-quests, even though the whole reason they’re here is specifically to kill Batman (except Shiva is only really here to assess Batman for her master, Ra’s). 

"Oh God, oh God, my back is snapped like a pack of uncooked
spaghetti! You just walk up and break my back without saying
a word!? Boo! Boo on you, sir!"

Only about two of the game’s main villains that aren’t the Joker are well-served by the script: Copperhead and Bane. Copperhead stands in for Scarecrow in the now-standard trippy hallucination sequence that the games haven’t really bettered since the one in the first game where the game makes you think it’s broken before Bruce finally grabs the Scarecrow through a haze of hallucinations and kicks the stuffing out of him. She is, however, a competent and interesting female villain who, unlike most of them, can actually stand up to him in a fight and is only defeated by Batman’s trademark iron refusal to just die. Bane, however, very nearly steals the show from the Clown Prince, practically assuming the villain spotlight at the start of the third act. His motivations are barely hinted at and not explored, but if they had been he’d even have a decent character arc – frightened in childhood by recurring nightmares of a giant bat, he works his entire life to become the strongest and most powerful figure in the criminal underworld, gaining a dependence on Venom to maintain his edge and graduating to TN-1 (the progenitor of Dr Young’s perfected Titan formula from Asylum) when he is first defeated by Batman and desperate to gain an upper hand, transforming him from a large, burly, coat-wearing tactician a la The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane into the Hulk-like, intellectually-compromised but still threatening and devious monster of the earlier games. 

Pity no situations ever arose in the later games where these
gloves could have been useful.

In fact, the plot itself doesn’t especially stand up to scrutiny, mainly because the game seems confused about who its main villain actually is. Initially, Black Mask is clearly the villain because he’s hired assassins to kill Batman, so either Batman will need to fight through them to bring down Sionis’ criminal empire, or he’s just using the assassins as a distraction while he does something even more heinous. But no, Black Mask is actually the Joker and he’s doing all of this to rob a bank – something he accomplishes more or less without a hitch about a third of the way into the game. So why did he hire those assassins at all? The game itself makes explicit, in quite a good scene where Joker meets Dr Harleen Quinzel for the first time and flashbacks to his origin story, that the Joker has only become fascinated with Batman this night after the Dark Knight rescued him from a fatal fall from the Royal hotel, so what benefit to him was there in hiring a load of assassins to kill someone he doesn’t care about? Come the two-thirds mark, though, and it seems like Bane is the main villain now: he effortlessly towers over and dominates the Joker, he tries to have the insane clown killed after he proves a liability – almost succeeding except for Batman’s intervention – and attacks Wayne Manor after the dramatic reveal that he has deduced Batman’s identity. And, to top it all off, he provides the game’s final and genuinely different stealth-based boss fight reminiscent of – but never quite reaching – the heady heights of City’s duel with Mister Freeze. Unfortunately, he is dragged down from True Villain status by two fairly large setbacks. First, he takes his mask off (yes, yes, I know, it seems like nothing but this is Bane we’re talking about here, and he very pointedly never ever does this in the comics) and second, for some reason he seems happy by the end to be working as the Joker’s stooge again, serving as the muscle needed to enact Joker’s plan. Ultimately, it is him and his trained mercenaries that are the most dangerous and competent figures Batman encounters in the game – and it is a particularly nice touch that his men look up to him like a Ché Guevara-type revolutionary figure – but as with Arkham City’s League of Assassins and Strange’s Tyger guards, they are overshadowed by the Joker's omnipresent leering grin and manic behaviour.

Pleasing as it is to hear Nolan North's surprisingly convincing
East End gangster voice spitting "wanker" and "prat" everywhere,
someone should tell the writers that "numpty" isn't an adjective.

A truly satisfying climax to the game would have been a showdown with Bane in a burning Wayne Manor, as a beaten and disadvantaged Bruce uses his speed, smarts, stealth and surroundings to overcome his vastly superior opponent. But, Firefly provides the worst-timed interruption in history and prevents Batman from stopping Bane's assault on his home. Instead, the final thirty minutes of the game are spent thwarting another prison break at Blackgate (note to writers: returning to the game's first location for its final one does not give an epic sense of fulfilment, or circularity, or foreshadowing, it's just a bit cheap) that only seems to occur as an afterthought because Warner Bros. Games Montreal needed a way to get the Joker back into the plot because we'd gone more than ten minutes without seeing him doing something crazy and awesome and funny and kooky and showing what a truly devious and cool villain he is (The Dark Knight was great and all, but it's got a lot to answer for). This being said, Joker and Bane's joint plot to force Batman to break his One Rule is actually pretty smart - Bane's ludicrous decision to risk death teaming up with a criminal he admits to despise and distrust notwithstanding - as is Batman's way of getting out of it, and it's pleasing to see Wayne's determination to be better than the criminals he fights finally winning over Captain Gordon and laying the groundwork for the mutually trusting relationship they will show in the later games. In addition, the final confrontation with the Joker in the prison chapel is a brilliantly written examination of the characters' never-ending conflict, as Batman refuses to kill the Joker because of his morality and the Joker refuses to kill Batman because he's just so much fun - and the way this relationship stacks all the advantages on the Joker's side - even as Batman subjects the Joker to a beatdown so brutal and drawn-out that it becomes funny, then painful, then funny again (seriously, someone who gets punched in the head that many times in the face by a six-foot martial artist with kevlar gloves is dead, One Rule or no One Rule). It's a good ending, but not a great one, and that slightly disappointing inability to reach true greatness is a hallmark of Arkham Origins' overall quality.

Ah, a teenage Barbara Gordon. Give her an inch, she takes
a foot, soon she doesn't have a leg to stand on and she's
only half the girl she used to be.

As usual, the game has a wealth of side quests to add length and replayability. Predictably, the largest and longest side-quest here is the one that sees Batman trying to deal with Edward Nashton - here calling himself Enigma, in a sort of prototype-version of the final Riddler persona he's developing for himself - in a protracted collect-a-thon to prove the Caped Crusader's intellectual superiority. This time, Enigma positions himself as an information broker, and isn't really interested in smugly proving his cleverness to Wayne, and while he still taunts and dissuades you over the radio, he's much more interested in his own agenda of releasing all of the city's dirty little secrets online and bringing Gotham to its knees. Unfortunately, Nashton isn't the Riddler yet, and so doesn't actually riddle you. Whereas the previous games' Riddler trophies were a small but satisfying collectible to pick up in between the more enjoyable and interesting riddles that tested your ability to spot the games' welter of Batman lore hidden in the scenery - and your tolerance of awful puns - here Enigma's collectible blackmail files and destructible network relays, as well as his usual green-tinted informants, are the be-all and end-all of stopping his scheme in the usual off-hand Batman manner that typically involves putting his fist through a computer screen. At least the blackmail tapes do a double duty as the game's 'audio diaries', similar to the previous games' interview tapes, and you have an actual in-story reason to be collecting them other than Wayne's magpie-like fascination with glinting pick-ups. Further bolstering the cast is Occupy Wall Street meets Anonymous style revolutionary Anarky, who sets bombs throughout Gotham while hacking into TV screens and projections to broadcast his message of liberation and violent revolt against The Man. When you finally confront him and his small band of helpers, though, Anarky is basically just a regular stun baton-wielding mook with a bit more health, who automatically drops like a sack of potatoes once you take out all his helpers anyway.

Alfred is shocked, shocked, to discover bats in the batcave.

One thing that does improve from game to game is the soundtrack, and here Christopher Drake supplies the most Batman-sounding score the Arkham games have had yet. While there are no individual pieces that stand out as much as Ron Fish's credits music for the first game, or Nick Arundel's fantastic main theme for the second game, the overall quality of the soundtrack is much more consistent across the board and truly fits the organic fusion of Nolan's realistic grittiness and Burton's gothic weirdness that the Arkham games seem to have chosen as their tone, and there are some very good pieces that perfectly fit the mood of the game - especially Deathstroke's battle theme and the incorporation of 'Carol of the Bells' into the Joker's theme.

On a scale of ‘burn it and sterilise the area’ to ‘venerate it as the standard by which all others will be judged’, Origins falls uncomfortably between ‘good’ and ‘great’: easily as competent and well-written a character study as City was, but never quite as inspired or structured as Rocksteady’s game. In some ways, it feels like an extremely large piece of DLC for Arkham City: instead of building upon the game that came before it like City did, Origins is content to give you more of the same with some slightly different outfits and more snow. There's nothing wrong with more of the same, of course (More Arkham City? Yes please!), but while City's trade of Metroidvania-style structural tightness for a larger expanse of Gotham was ultimately to the game's benefit, Origins' reheated gameplay and even larger setting are just spreading the same amount of butter over a bigger slice of bread.

7/10 - The series isn't on the Wayne just yet.

Film - Sucker Punch (2011)

I'm gonna punch you, sucka

Sucker Punch is the story of a girl known only as Babydoll (Emily Browning, A Series of Unfortunate Events), who finds herself delivered by her abusive stepfather to an insane asylum after the accidental death of her sister. While under the care of Dr Gorski (Carla Gugino, Sin City, Spy Kids) and the rapey eyes of orderly Blue (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davies), Babydoll hallucinates herself and her fellow inmates (Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone) into a burlesque house, in which they delve even further into fantasy to engage in epic, fantastical battles with monsters, robots and steampunk gasmask undead German soldiers (which must surely be what you get at the centre of the Venn Diagram of All-Time Cliched Enemies). By fighting these battles, Babydoll and her friends hope to acquire four essential items - a map, a fire, a key, and a knife. In doing so, they hope to find a way to escape the burlesque house, escape the asylum, and escape the living hell their realities have become.

Blue here is the only character with an actual personality: a smug,
annoying, overconfident, rapey git.

Except for this film, Zack Snyder has become recognised for his cinematic midwifery, dutifully if not masterfully delivering the intellectual children of George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead) and Frank Miller (300); the swiftly-disowned sprog of Alan Moore (Watchmen); and the test-tube golden boy of DC Comics (Man of Steel). Watchers of Watchmen and 300 will know that Snyder has an eye for elaborate, heightened visuals reminiscent of graphic novels, but can he bring that same flair to the script, the story, and the cast of characters he now finds it his responsibility to bring into this world as he finally embraces the life-creating powers of his own cinematic motherhood?

No. No he can't.

Like Inception, released a year beforehand - I would imagine while this film was in production, so it probably wasn't an influence - Sucker Punch toys with the idea of multiple levels of reality and hallucination that become more fantastical the further down you go. Between the levels, there are various symbolic connections - the asylum psychiatrist becomes the brothel's madame, for example - often based either on the characters or upon the visual motifs required by the plot (for example, the lighter that Babydoll steals in the brothel world is represented in the fantasy world by fire crystals). However, we spend the majority of our time in the brothel world rather than the asylum - the real world, and thus the only one that could be said to 'matter'. This, of course, should not present problems on its own: we spent much more time in Inception's dream worlds than its real one. However, the connections between each world only function on a symbolic level and not a logical one. Doubtless you're supposed to nod and appreciate the interweaving elements between the worlds, but there is no moment where you realise how clever it all is: the film only leaves you with questions. From start to finish, with its highly-stylised Gothic aesthetic, dreamlike visuals and psychedelic musical moments, Sucker Punch radiates a ‘clever me’ pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness that could give lessons in ‘rubbing you up the wrong way’ to a sandpaper suppository. 

Actually, this fight is sort of fine. At this stage the film still seems
like it's actually going to get deeper.

As usual, we reach the part of the review where I discuss characters. Like recent review Non-Stop, Sucker Punch makes this difficult. Non-Stop makes this difficult by sketching the characters as thinly as possible to preserve mystery and suspense. Sucker Punch makes this difficult because it doesn't have characters: it just has stuffed costumes that move around and deliver lines with all the enthusiasm of a postman who's one rainy bike ride away from a killing spree. It’s a mark of the total lack of substance to every single element of this film that isn’t the CGI that when lead character Babydoll finally has her lobotomy, I either didn’t notice the difference or just didn’t care enough to. As far as the film seems to show us, Babydoll belongs in the asylum. Her first reaction to her stepfather trying to steal her and her sister’s inheritance is to shoot him – and even in a tremendously confined space, she somehow, in violation of physics, common sense and possibility itself, manages to miss the bulk of her overweight stepfather and hit her small sister crouching harmlessly in a corner. What’s more, she’s clearly so psychologically unstable that within minutes of arriving at the asylum not only is she hallucinating, but her hallucinations are hallucinating too. To make matters worse, the other girls making up the team are virtually characterless aside from the usual tedious old archetypes (the groundlessly confrontational bitchy one, the quirky and amusing one, the reluctant one who doesn’t want to get involved, and… the other one. Christ knows what her personality may have been), and the film doesn't even bother to make clear what the connection between the various ‘dream levels’ might be. Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) is the one who escapes at the end, so she is clearly real, but the rest? I have no idea. And if they’re not real, why should the audience care about their problems, or when they die? Rocket (Jena Malone) dies in the action-fantasy world, so she also dies in the brothel world… does that mean she also dies in the asylum world (if she’s even there)? And if she is there and doesn’t die, what happens to her? The movie doesn’t tell you. 

The Wise Man prepares to go over the top. If only the film had
enough character to do the same.

The excitement and satisfaction of watching Inception lies in the audience being able to see and appreciate the clever links between the various dream levels – how physical changes in one affect movement or gravity in another, and how the time distortion works in relation to the music and the falling van used as the ‘kick’. But even more satisfyingly, all of these elements are logically connected both to each other and to the real world Cobb and Fischer. Sucker Punch, by contrast, never bothers to explain how any of the links between its nested worlds work, or how they relate to the real one. How does doing a dance in the brothel world equate to fighting an army of Orcs in the fantasy world (and why would any of Babydoll’s audience think that the doubtless deranged flailing that results makes for a nice dance)? What sort of obstacles does one meet in pickpocketing a lighter that they would also meet in fighting an army of Orcs to steal fire crystals from a dragon? How does retrieving the lighter in the brothel by dancing equate to retrieving a lighter in the asylum? I don’t know, and I have a horrible feeling that Zack Snyder doesn’t know either. I suspect that Snyder simply tossed a couple of trite symbols and associated images up in the air and linked them together as flimsily as sheer laziness would allow so that they still formed some vague semblance of a plot – and I use the word as loosely as anyone possibly can. I can slightly believe that the brothel’s High Roller (Jon Hamm), who is actually the surgeon assigned to perform Babydoll’s lobotomy, might have visited the asylum beforehand and she might know what he looks like in order to hallucinate him. What I do not understand is how in the name of God’s tit the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) acting as Babydoll’s hallucinatory mentor can also turn out to be a random bus driver that Babydoll has neither seen nor met before. It comes across as Snyder’s take on Nolan’s wobbling totem (oo-er), but there’s a fine line between introducing ambiguity and introducing confusion. Christopher Nolan is very good at walking that line before tying everything up neatly at the end. Snyder is not even aware that there is such a line, much less how to resolve his movie satisfactorily once he’s crossed it. 

In some ways, it's very impressive that a movie can make a
sight like this boring.

Sucker Punch constantly tries to make you go “Ah!”, but only ever manages to inspire “Eh?”. Adding to the simply unexplained mysteries above, there are glaring logical inconsistencies springing like leaks in a cartoon plumbing system, and Snyder just doesn't have the flexible Looney Tune anatomy to plug them all. Are we expected to believe that a high profile surgeon could attend the asylum, in order to perform a lobotomy on a new patient who has been resident for less than a week, without the knowledge of that patient’s own supervising psychiatrist? Characters messing up in movies because they don’t communicate like real people is an all-too-common and regrettable staple of fiction, but it is especially egregious here. Surely, after receiving the forged lobotomy request, there should have been a phone call that went something like: 

        “Hello, Dr Gorski, I’m just confirming that I can come and perform the procedure on your patient.”

          “What procedure?”

          “The lobotomy on Babydoll.” 

          “I didn’t authorise that.”

          “This signature says you did.”

          “BLUUUUEEEEE!” *angry fist shaking* 

Even if such a conversation didn’t happen, are we supposed to believe that at no point between the lobotomy being arranged – itself impossible at such short notice or regarding a patient who hasn’t even been diagnosed yet – and it being performed was Dr Gorski made aware of the fact that her own newest patient was scheduled for a serious operation? Did she not look at her own patient’s file? Did she not ask why the surgeon came to the asylum without – as far as she knows – being asked? Did no-one else who works at the asylum see ‘her’ letter requesting the lobotomy and ask her what the hell she was doing?

Stare at this picture for a few seconds, while listening to some
trippy psychedelic music, bobbing your head about until you feel
dizzy and remembering the last experience that made you feel
generally dissatisfied. You have now basically watched the film.

I won’t comment much on the portrayal of women in this film, mainly because it’s too confusing to really go into. I’m not sure whether it’s a dumb, teenage masturbatory fantasy that reduces women to tempting confections who can snarl and fight against men as long as they can never actually win, or whether it’s a satire of dumb, teenage masturbatory fantasies that reduce women to tempting confections who can snarl and fight against men as long as they can never actually win. But, as the film fails tremendously on both counts, I won’t really go into it. All I will say is that any film that features over-sexualised, schoolgirl-costumed girls whose looks are the sum total of their personalities in a world where nearly every male character is either literally or symbolically a rapist has me very worried indeed. However, in all honesty, to even pay enough attention to the film to be angered by its ideology is a service that it doesn’t deserve – you’d almost certainly be putting more thought into it than its creators did. It would be disingenuous of me to imply that Sucker Punch is the only film that suffers from these problems: it’s not. I also do not say that films with these problems are necessarily bad: they aren’t. But what a film – a good film – needs to have to overcome such problems is a hook. Something the audience can latch onto to hold their interest and pull them through the tangled, brambly forest of the treacherous roots and clutching branches of inconsistent plotting, meandering or non-existent story, flat characters and uninspired or downright ill-advised performances. Flash Gordon, for example, suffers from many of these problems (with the exception of the performances which are all solid gold ham), but the over-the-top cheesiness and outrageous camp pulls it through. Sucker Punch has nothing. What the film attempts to demonstrate in visual flair and imagination carries no weight because it relies entirely on bombastic but insubstantial CGI. The only area in which the film could have clawed back some precious points is in its soundtrack, which features a generally-appropriate selection of licensed music, except that every track is a uniformly-awful cover, and I quite simply cannot forgive the treatment of even one of my least favourite of the Beatles' oeuvre like this. I suppose I could be being unfair on the film - perhaps I am expecting too much of it? But, perusing the reviews, I see words like "repellent", "dull", "boring" and "soul-crushing". Overall, the film was received about as popularly as a fat lactose intolerant man chugging four-cheese pizzas in a stranded lift full of dwarfs. 

Snyder’s 300 was just as shallow as this film, but the hilariously larger-than-life performances of its cast ensure it remains a fairly entertaining watch, even if slow motion is overused to the extent that the movie would be about twenty minutes long without it, and 300 at least had the selling point that it wasn’t an original Snyder work (although I personally find Frank Miller’s usual portrayals of women, homosexuals or indeed any group other than burly white guys even more worrying than in this film). Sucker Punch looks good in parts. That’s it. By the close of the film, Babydoll has undergone a lobotomy; the audience will be wishing they had; and the film itself doesn't have enough brains to be worth opening up its skull for. Perhaps the only clever part of this film is the way that the first word of the title tells you what you are for watching it and the second word suggests a more fulfilling experience to subject yourself to.

0/10 - It's a mad, sad, bad, flat world