Unfortunately, the film is also painfully juvenile with a target audience of adolescent boys who define their world as being surrounded by bullies and beautiful, unobtainable girls "in real life", and bad guys, dragons and demons to kill with various cool and hyper-aggressive weapons in their virtual, video-game-fueled lives. It's no surprise that the women in the film are all costumed in fetishistic outfits with plunging necklines, bare midriffs, über-short skirts and long stockings. They're all very sexy but, unsurprisingly, there's no actual sex in the film.

Sucker Punch starts out with a dark, moody sequence where late teen blonde waif Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is trapped in a gothic monstrosity of a house with her scary, leering stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). When she rejects his advances after her mom has passed away, he turns his attentions to her little sister, to which Baby reacts by finding a gun and shooting him. She misfires and her sister ends up killed and his revenge is to have her locked up in the home for the mentally insane.

And that's where it switches from a delightfully creepy horror film into an incoherent genre mashup. Baby Doll meets the other babes in distress that become her posse: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). They're all required to act out erotic plays in the speakeasy then entertain individual customers, through which we realize that all the women in Sucker Punch are victims of sadistic men, and that there are no bad women -- or good men -- in the entire narrative.

Sucker Punch is a mess. The storyline barely makes sense and the constant transitions from fantasy to "reality", era to era, genre to genre, left me asking "WTF?" more than once during the movie. By the end it was just exhausting and while the effects were splendid, the storyline was too weak to sustain it. I can only recommend this for adolescent men who want to see their soft porn mixed with a strong dose of video game visuals and effects.

The film opens up with a bank robbery, and it's clear immediately that this isn't a suave, sophisticated gang of thieves who are going to charm their victims, but a tough band of thugs who use physical force and intimidation to frighten them. Affleck plays disaffected criminal Doug MacRay, a lifelong Charlestown (Boston) resident who commits heists with his dangerously violent brother James (Jeremy Renner).

The bank robbery doesn't transpire as planned and they grab bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) and use her as a hostage to guarantee a smooth getaway. On Doug's urging, they release her unharmed and when FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) later interviews her, he's suspicious. But can Claire identify the robbers? That's the central question in the film, and Doug begins stalking her -- and then dating her -- to ensure she doesn't rat them out. Add in the "one more job" trope and you've got The Town.

Even with the occasionally ragged storyline, the action was exciting, the dialog gritty, vulgar and believable, the film reeked of verisimilitude, the performances were all spot-on, and the exterior shots of Boston were terrific. I really enjoyed The Town and anticipate Affleck becoming a reliable director of great films, much as Clint Eastwood has transformed his career and become one of the top directors in Hollywood. In a nutshell: go see The Town. You won't regret it.