Sucker Punch (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Zack Snyder. Starring Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish.
An unfortunate attempt at an original property by writer/director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen).
Placed in a mental hospital by her abusive stepfather, a young woman (Emily Browning) has escapist fantasies about adventures with her fellow inmates. In each one, tightly clad women kill scores of monsters with swords and machine guns. It's the kind of female empowerment 14-year-old boys can get behind.
Movies of this style are sometimes compared to music videos, but I've never seen a case where that description was so apt. Sucker Punch is almost literally a series of high-budget videos set to the director's favorite songs, and it would have been far better left to that format. In a feature film, the fantasy sequences are a clumsy, artless allegory with nothing to do with one other or with the main plot (a dull and derivative melodrama about an escape from the mental hospital). The script wastes no time confirming that it is indeed just an excuse to depict scenes of trench warfare against zombies, a dragon fighting an airplane, and any other spectacle the writers could dream up without the shackles of context and common sense.
The battle scenes are as pretty, precise, and saturated with slow motion as one would expect from Snyder, but the structure of the movie makes them tedious. Their content is irrelevant and their outcome assured. They are the labours of Hercules; the levels in a video game; a laundry list of chores whose only purpose is to be brushed aside and conquered on the way to a greater goal. Before today, there have been plenty of opportunities to call Snyder's action sequences juvenile, overindulgent, or epileptic, but I never imagined they would be boring.
It may be occasionally awe-inspiring, but it's a patchwork of bad ideas that should have been left alone.
Rated PG-13 for implied dancing.
2.5 out of 5
