In Zach Snyders newest film Sucker Punch, film goers are taken on a high octane visual ride. And YES, the film is just as cliche as THAT description of it. It is hard to characterize where Sucker Punch goes wrong. It SHOULD be fun. It has all the parts of what should create a perfect machine of high adrenaline kinetic ass kickery that leaves your brain spinning yet begging for more. But – it’s NOT, and it Doesn’t. At its best – it is like a love letter to all things HEAVY METAL; Lovely ladies, in fantastical and alluring outfits, kicking ass and doing damage. At it’s worst – it is like a never ending music video for a sound track that would have been really edgy & exciting in 1998. All the glitz, glam, and explosions don’t make up for where the story and performances just fail to engage the audience.

The story gives us Baby Doll; a 20 year old waif who is being sent against her will to an insane asylum after an attempt to kill her morally corrupt step father leads to the accidental death of her sister. Once in the mental Hospital, we quickly learn that the management is corrupt, and that our heroine has five days before she will be Lobotomized. Then – things go all Inception on us – we are no longer in the asylum, but a whore house/ cabaret. And instead of being lobotomized, in five days Baby Doll (or more over – her virginity) is going to be hoisted up on a silver platter to a “High Roller” client to the “establishment of ill repute”. Then we get ANOTHER layer to this onion, by adding in the Dancing-but-not-really-dancing-but-fantasizing-about-fighting-scenes. We are given the rather absurd reasoning that the girls have to dance – to attract clients (Really?). And thusly Baby doll HAS to dance. This is where the epic fight scenes that you see in the trailers and all the cool promotional and collectible art come in. Baby Doll imagines fighting when she dances. We never see her dance – and we never see her fight in any way that could be mistaken for anything dance like. We just get to see reaction shots from everyone else that make you wonder what the hell she is doing. Is the shy blonde waif really a bump and grinding freak? Or perhaps – a gymnast? Nope. No explanation. Apparently her sexy dance borders on hypnotizing, and THAT is all the rational you are going to get. Coupled with the other characters and their half ass developed stories – All of this gets mushed together into a story about escaping. But in the end is just about mental escapism. Which is more or less ALL that Sucker Punch ever aspires to be. A distraction.

So lets recap; Sucker Punch is fighting, substituting for sexy dancing, in a whore house, that is really an asylum. To add to the sense of metal disorientation you have the fact that the film makers play fast and loose with time and place at every level of the story. The insane asylum is vague vintage Americana circa 1950’s or 60’s. The whore house is Gypsy Rose Lee area Burlesque in look – but they dance to contemporary artists like Bjork. Then the fight sequences are just all over the place merging the past with futurism etc etc. Which makes you ask the question; How the HELL does Baby Doll imagine this stuff?!?! In the end it feels less about good story telling and more about maximizing selling merchandise to consumers at Comic Con and Hot Topic. In early interviews Snyder called Sucker Punch “Alice in Wonderland with Machine Guns”. But I think a fellow Bot summed it up perfectly as “Empty-headed bauble. A movie mashup of Brazil, Moulin Rouge, Kill Bill, and Girl Interrupted.”.