Photo Credit: justincarreiro.blogspot.com

Who needs a plot when you have a giant robot with a bunny face?

Grade: D

Sucker Punch is the film equivalent of a Jersey Shore character; it has all the styled surface attractions money can buy, but its outer appeal is clearly trying to compensate for something. It was perfectly believable from the previews that this film might be missing a brain (or any cognitive element for that matter); but the final product reveals a production without a heart. Style over substance films have never been as egregiously overblown, simple-minded, and insensitive as Sucker Punch. Sucker Punch wanted to be the coolest fantasy action epic created; unfortunately, it tries to mix every idea from every influence it had. If it had been more aptly named Lord of the Inception Matrixs Who Wanted to Kill Bill, audiences may have had more of an idea of how illogical and meaningless a ride they were in for.

The first ingredient to Sucker Punch’s failure is that it convinces itself that it has a story to tell; at least 300 was humble enough to forgo such a formality. There’s a basic premise in the tale of Babydoll, an oppressed and depressed (but certainly not repressed) young girl sent to an asylum by her evil stepfather. The asylum—whose inmates are seemingly restricted to attractive young women and which, by some unexplainable turn of events doubles as a Burlesque club—is run by sexist, black-hearted molesters. Babydoll must employ the help of the other inmates (given respectable, female friendly names such as Rocket, Sweet Pea, Amber, and Blondie) to escape the asylum.

If you watched the preview or have seen any posters, you must be questioning, “At what point do these girls fight dragons or destroy zeppelins? How much action could occur in the cells of a mental asylum filled with scantily clad women?” Sucker Punch has an answer: Babydoll has frequent daydreams in the course of her adventure, during which she and her friends fight orcs, mechs, and undead fascists (among other things), all the while under the guidance of a nameless old mentor. The result of these random and ultimately pointless action scenes is that the audience has no investment in how anything turns out. Action without context isn’t gripping—even with visual flair, there is no need to root for any of the characters or their struggle (in fact, I felt a closer bond to the Dragon than with any other character). At some point, you wonder if perhaps Babydoll actually needs to be in an asylum; she certainly doesn’t skimp on delusions of grandeur.

Nor, it seems, does the director. Sucker Punch, as directed by Zack Snyder, creator of the Dawn of the Dead remake, Watchmen, and 300, has a certain level of visual splendor. He made his notable career on films with so much visual style that any storytelling deficiencies could be plausibly overlooked for the sake of vicarious thrills (and for Sparta!). However, all of these prior works were adaptations; Sucker Punch is Snyder’s first originally written large screen picture. With his taste for eye candy antics, you get the feeling that Snyder was unsure about what kind of adventure he wanted to showcase in explosive, slow-motion, half naked grandeur first. With this dilemma, Snyder opted to create an adolescent boy’s fantasy buffet, in which he simply dips his hands into every action spectacle cliché he could think of. The ending product is an incoherent, utterly senseless display of visual excess.

The film has the pretense of female empowerment, but this façade slides away when you see the girls presented as sexualized objects. In simple terms, it becomes difficult to grasp female liberation when slow motion cascades of cleavage, bare legs, and belly buttons dominate the screen. The film’s complete lack of intuition with its own subjects is both offensive and embarrassing.

The visual and aural aspects of the film offer some respite from the atrocious dialogue or the inane story, but they too sour all too quickly. The first half of the film has more slow motion power shots than the entire Matrix trilogy—you’ll have time to examine every bullet fired, contemplate every martial arts move, and make a sandwich during the passage of what should otherwise take half a second of real time. The music is similarly overblown—the licensed soundtrack is even more clichéd and distracting than that of Watchmen. The film’s opening scene alone demonstrates Snyder’s interest in making the most visual, aural experience possible—unfortunately, it feels more like an Avril Lavigne music video than anything else.

Sucker Punch obviously wasn’t intended to be an exercise in intellectual thinking or philosophical understanding. However, there was no call for a film that would be an exercise in incoherence, insensitivity, and pure kinetic action gluttony. Snyder has finally breached the boundaries of how much fun can be held in a story with hardly any narrative function to its vision. Watching this movie is like eating a deep-fried Snickers bar; by the end, when you’re good and sick, you’ll be wondering how the initial appeal seemed so attractive before.