- Concept
- Plot
- Characters
- Music
“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.
I always read critics’ reviews before watching a movie and this is what I got for “Sucker Punch”. I almost lost my interest on “Sucker Punch” after reading this but took the “Leap of Faith” for you people 
.
Introduction
The movie “Sucker Punch” is kinda mix-up of several movies, including Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, Cinderella and The Lord of the Rings into a faux-profound, nearly feminist blowout.
The Plot
Fantasy world: The First
In 1955, a 20 year old girl nicknamed Babydoll (Emily Browning) is sent to a mental institution by her wicked stepfather after her attempts to kill him, but accidentally shoots her sister instead. Her stepfather brides a corrupt orderly named Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) to have Babydoll undergo a trans-orbital lobotomy. And in the meantime, she creates a fantasy world of her own where she imagines herself as a new arrival at a brothel run by Jones, with Dr. Vera Gorski (the asylum’s main therapist, starring Carla Gugino) serving as the girls’ dance instructor. There, she befriends four other dancers: Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Venessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and her older sister, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Whenever Babydoll dances, she again retreats into another fantasy world where and her friends are dressed in skimpy, burlesque clothing wielding swords and assault rifles, battling gun-weilding samurai, dragons, robots, orcs and steam-punk zombie soldiers (that’s twice the fantasy; kinda like “Inception”, only stupid).
And their goal…
… is to retrieve five items: a map, fire, a knife, a key, with the final being unknown. And they have to race against the time to escape, as she has been sold to ‘the High Roller’ (Babydoll’s doctor, starring John Hamm), who will be arriving in five days.
Now the Main part
I must say, Snyder certainly has quite the imagination (or should I say fetish) but he really can’t write worth a damn. “Sucker Punch” is what would happen if “Inception” was written by a horny thirteen-year-old boy. The story makes no attempt at anything that resembles the structure and content of a motion picture. To compare its construction to a video game would offend gamers. Even board games have a higher artistic value.
Moving on…
Fantasy World: The Second
The characters are no characters either. The girls themselves serve absolutely no purpose other than to look sexy wearing as low as little clothing a PG-13 ratings allow.
While the five actresses look sexy, none of them do any actual acting. Emily Browning sports the same glazed-over expression with her flat dialogue delivery. Jena Malone fares better as the ‘tough chick’ but only Abbie Cornish’s performance comes close to being three-dimensional, providing some semblance of drama. Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung end up doing very little except as window-dressing. As the villain, Oscar Isaac excels at playing a slimy sleaze-ball. Carla Gugino spends much of the film sporting a heavy Russian accent and Jon Hamm only appears in two scenes that amount to absolutely nothing. Finally, there’s Scott Glenn in an Obi-Wan Kenobi role as the Wise Man, sprouting such golden nuggets of wisdom such as, ‘If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’
Come on, Snyder, I know you can do better than this. Make us proud in “Superman”!
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