Rating: 
“Sucker Punch” ain’t no movie. “Sucker Punch” is an excess of testosterone vomited into a reel of celluloid until it is violently splashed into the faces of its audience. The movie’s advertisements are diligent in declaring its promise: “You will be unprepared.” They were right. I was not prepared for the overwhelming atrocity that I had to bear during the course of its running time. By the movie’s end, I felt that my senses had been pummeled to dust.
The plot, if that’s what you call it, is this: A grieving girl who has just lost her mother has been framed by her stepfather for murder, and is now imprisoned in a mental institution. A lobotomy awaits her. So, in the meantime, she creates a fantasy world of her own. Within that fantasy world, she creates another fantasy world. That’s twice the fantasy. It’s kinda like “Inception”, only stupid.
The girl’s fantasy actually belongs to Zack Snyder, writer and director. One of his most popular films is “300”, a movie where its heroes wage war wearing nothing but a cape and their underwear, so the enemy could marvel at the sight of their abs, and get distracted. In “Sucker Punch”, five young women charge into battles with their short skirts and high heels. In the fantasy world, the second one, the girls are against kamikaze robot bombers, blazing angry dragons, giant samurais, and, of course, a few hundred steam-powered Nazi zombies. Movies by Zack Snyder aren’t about what’s rational or comprehensible. Reaching its truest form in “Sucker Punch”, Snyder makes movies to share with the world, his imagination, which was the vomit I was talking about earlier.
“Sucker Punch” makes no attempt at anything that resembles the structure and content of a motion picture. Narrative and exposition are not minimized, but totally abandoned. To compare its construction to a video game would offend gamers. Heck, even board games have a higher artistic value. What’s disguised as a story is really a collection of Zack Snyder’s childhood daydreams thoughtlessly and shapelessly plastered on the screen. Movies start out as ideas, and it takes great talent to successfully make that transition. Snyder has a lot of ambition, but lacks the mindset and maturity to back it up.
The characters are no characters either. The five girls are but a set of body parts; some are directly used while others are for display purposes only. When the audience needs to be informed of something, one of the girls, any of them, use their mouth: “We can’t do that! He’ll kill us!” Or when a scene is slowed down just because it looks better that way, Snyder makes sure that someone within the frame is wearing something “nice”, because he thinks we’re like him, who can’t stand a minute without a robot or lingerie.
It’s difficult to imagine Snyder having any more testosterone left after “Sucker Punch”. But, if he does, may he keep the rest of it to himself.
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