Sucker Punch: Marginally Less Dreary Than Inception

A A A Comments (4) By Nick Pinkerton Wednesday, Mar 23 2011

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Sucker Punch
Directed by Zack Snyder
Warner Bros.
Opens March 25

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A layer-cake trip with a touch of "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Sucker Punch begins, after a murky prologue, with Baby Doll (Emily Browning, a peroxided kewpie) being dragged into a home for the “mentally insane” by her wicked stepdad. Our heroine in a no-exit corner, we shift abruptly into what is presumably Baby Doll’s psychogenic fugue state, in which she imagines herself among a stable of alt-porn-y chicks imprisoned in a bordello by some guys dressed as lounge singers. When forced to dance for her captors, Baby Doll escapes still deeper into “empowering” non sequitur action-combat stages, her fantasies looking remarkably like the daydreams of an adolescent GamePro reader. The video-game frame of reference is confirmed when Scott Glenn pops up at the beginning of each level to deliver nostrums and mission objectives, sending the girls after “a map, fire, a knife, and a key” (all that’s missing is an inventory menu). Director Zack Snyder’s dispensing with any explanatory exposition—hence the blindsiding implicit in the title—makes this King Ludwig–size extravagance marginally less dreary than Inception. But his mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they’re-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.

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Mereholdway 08/27/2011 2:53:00 AM

Great review. Most tedious movie ever. The whole time I kept thinking that this would have been a fun video game. As a movie, ugh.

Claytony 05/05/2011 6:17:00 PM

You should go into this movie knowing it isn't going to be a cinema masterpiece. IT's entertaining and showy, made for a particular crowed. Not for everybody to rip apart into something that was meant to be a masterful story when it was clearly made for its showy slutty, fighting scenes and nothing more. It almost seems as though Snyder put in the plot twists as a giant middle finger to everyone looking for the deeper meaning when there truly is none.