Grade: D-
Several months ago, promising trailers for a quizzically titled movie began popping up in cinemas. Boasting fast action, hot girls, a cool premise, and the direction of 300 and Watchmen's Zack Snyder, Sucker Punch looked like it had everything but a title that made sense.
Unfortunately, the film's title is about the only thing that makes sense in this disjointed excuse for a movie. What looked like spring's coolest action romp is in fact an incoherent and unintentionally hilarious mess. The "sucker punch" of the film's title refers to the viewer's jarring realization that he just dumped $10 to see this travesty.
The film begins with a cheesy voiceover explaining "guardian angels" and that everybody has one. In the following 10 minutes, protagonist Baby Doll (Emily Browning, The Uninvited) sees her mother die, has her inheritance stolen, hears her sister beaten and killed by her drunken stepfather, is framed for said murder, and is committed to an insane asylum in rural Vermont. Baby Doll's guardian angel must have been on vacation.
Things only get worse from there, both for Baby Doll and the film's unfortunate audience. Upon Baby Doll's arrival to the asylum, it is revealed that her stepfather plans to bribe an equally nefarious member of the asylum's staff to have Baby Doll lobotomized. We learn this because the two characters converse about it openly while Baby Doll awkwardly stands about four feet away from them in a scene that's so painfully stupid that the lobotomy they discuss seems preferable by comparison.
Virtually every following scene disjointedly compounds the nonsense. Most of the film takes place in what are ostensibly Baby Doll's inner fantasies, where we learn that the protagonist's inner psyche basically resembles that of a 14-year-old sexually-depraved fanboy.
There are two equally disquieting and sexist levels to this fantasy. The first involves Baby Doll relocating the asylum and its denizens to an imagined 1920s whorehouse context, where we meet the film's supporting cast, all of whom sport equally misogynistic names like "Sweat Pea" and "Blondie."
The second level of fantasy – in which all of the stylized action of the film's trailer takes place – is only entered when Baby Doll performs her "dances" for the "clients" of the "whorehouse" she imagines around her. If that last sentence made utterly no sense, don't worry, neither does the movie.
It's painfully evident from virtually everything that happens in Sucker Punch — which bears Snyder's first credit as a writer — that the director is downright clueless when it comes to writing much of anything.
Not a single character in the film is characterized in the slightest, with conflicts between the film's primary cast of hookerific heroines bursting in out of nowhere, only to be clumsily resolved just as quickly. These excuses for dramatic plot arcs are conveyed via dialog that's so bad it's actually funny, as the outbursts of giggling that filled the theater readily attested.
Snyder's sense of pacing is just as bad, as scenes flit between different storylines and emotional tones with such dissonance and disquietude that the film might as well be institutionalized for schizophrenia.
On top of all this, the gender dynamic Snyder presents in the film is so absurd, manipulative, and one-dimensional that it hinges on being offensive. Virtually every male character is portrayed as both sadistic and depraved. The female characters, on the other hand, are portrayed positively, but they all spend the entire movie in fetish costumes, acting out dissolute nerd fantasies, undercutting any empowering message there might have been.
Snyder can't take all the blame for this disaster, however. Browning and company couldn't act their way out of a cardboard box, let alone an insane asylum, while the original soundtrack is both unapologetically bad and cringingly overloud.
The only thing even slightly redeeming about Sucker Punch is the film's action, which is visually impressive but marred by its ponderous over-choreography and the fact that the scenarios give the impression that they were concocted by a middle school student.
Don't get sucker punched – avoid this movie at all costs.
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