Rating: 4/10
Running Time: 101 minutes
US Certificate: R UK Certificate: 18
On DVD
Lucy (Browning) is a pretty, young university student who has more jobs than the yellow pages – she’s a waitress, photocopy clerk in an office and research guinea pig – and in her spare time she visits an alcoholic (Leslie) with an ambiguous relationship to her and picks up guys with complete ease. Seemingly bored with a life not really going anywhere she decides to fill her spare 26 minutes per day with a job as an erotic plaything that has to be seen to be believed.
The theme of Sleeping Beauty seems to be pointlessness. Julia Leigh’s movie is crammed full of pointless things – pointless dialogue, pointless monologues, pointless scenes, pointlessly dragged out scenes, pointless digressions, pointless nudity and a storyline that in the end has no point. The final scene should probably have come half way through to give the movie some hope of progression and purpose but instead we are subjected to not a lot happening in an excrutiatingly extended time. The structure is also very disjointed and the film feels poorly edited as many of the scenes are poorly connected and a sense of continuity is just not there.
On screen we have a very pretty lead actress who seems to have more personality in her boobs than her personality as she goes through most of the movie with a neutral expression (bar the child birth noises at the end) and one who solves most problems with a flash of her chest. But to be fair, she’s not given too much to work with except a nihilistic character who gives nothing away and she does easily outshine some of the peripheral characters, including a very creepy old guy who acts like he’s doing Shakespeare in the West End (Carroll).
It's Got: Lots of pointless, acting that's no great shakes, pretty decent cinematography
It Needs: A sense of purpose, to be fitted together with more finesse
DVD Extras Trailer - that's it DVD Extras Rating: 2/10
Summary
An anti-fairy tale that has pointless dialogue, pointless monologues, pointless scenes, pointlessly dragged out scenes, pointless digression, pointless nudity and a storyline that in the end has no point.