Sucker Punch
Sucker Punch, a sprawling and convoluted action sci-fi fantasy, is director Zack Snyder's first "original" film, in that it's based on a script Snyder co-wrote (along with Steve Shibuya) and not a graphic novel or a previous movie. But to anyone who has seen Snyder's two previous live-action films, 300 and Watchmen, it will feel awfully familiar: His now-trademark flourishes - gorgeous visuals, elaborate action sequences, a desaturated color palette, a CGI-airbrushed "heightened reality," abundant slo-mo, and fatal self-seriousness - are all conspicuously on display.
It's all there, in fact, in Sucker Punch's opening sequence: a very intense and ultra-dramatic montage, set to a haunting cover of the Eurythmics' ''Sweet Dreams'' and slowed down to a crawl so that we may better admire every super-stylized detail of Snyder's exquisite handiwork. It depicts a series of wrenching domestic tragedies that result in the film's teenage heroine, Babydoll (Emily Browning), being shipped off to an all-girls mental hospital by her malevolent stepfather (Gerard Plunkett), properly setting the stage for the ensuing melodrama.
To ensure Babydoll doesn't act up again, evil stepdaddy bribes a corrupt orderly (Oscar Isaac) into having the traumatized but otherwise mentally competent girl lobotomized without the required consent of the facility's resident psychiatrist, Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino). The year is 1967, and lobotomies, though still legal, are exceedingly rare; as such, they must wait five days for the local lobotomizing physician (Jon Hamm) to come and turn Babydoll into a very pretty vegetable. Which is more than enough time for her to retreat into a dreamworld and concoct a vivid fantasy in which she and four scantily clad mates - Rocket (Jena Malone), Sweat Pea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Amber (Jamie Chung) - conspire to escape the brothel in which they're imprisoned.
The meat of the escape plan calls for a series of quests in which Babydoll and the gang battle giant samurais, World War I zombie troopers, futuristic alien robots, dragons, et al - all while dressed in sleek variants of the archetypal hot chick Halloween costumes (sexy nurse, sexy schoolgirl, sexy sanitation worker, etc.). The sequences are well-choreographed and visually stimulating but have very little connection to the plot - they're more like beautiful and disposable diversions, grandiose music videos in which Snyder is able to cram elements from a broad spectrum of pop culture influences, from Hong Kong cinema and anime to Moulin Rouge and Heavy Metal, without any apparent rules or logic to bind his fertile imagination.
All of which wouldn't be so bad - honestly, it wouldn't - if Sucker Punch weren't so punishingly maudlin. Nary a scene goes by in which some poor girl isn't threatened or smacked or nearly raped. (All the women in the film are victims; the men, with the exception of Scott Glenn's imaginary character, monsters.) A movie with hot chicks and guns and orcs and robots and zombies should, at the very least, be fun. But Snyder's film is dour and pretentious to the point of pain, an overstuffed emo tragedy bracketed by ponderous voiceover about demons and monsters and how all of us have the weapons within us to defeat them. Or something like that. Sucker Punch is such a molten-hot mess that whatever Important Message it's supposed to convey ends up hopelessly garbled by the time the end credits roll.
Hollywood.com rated this film 2 stars.