Yes, you will be unprepared... about how terrible this movie is. No stars- see anything else.

sucker punch (suk’r puh-nch) v.  1. A blow or assault made without warning.  2. A harmful act that comes as a surprise and without provocation.  3. A bitch move.

Oddly enough, this aptly describes the experience of watching Sucker Punch.  Who would have thought that the film’s title was more of a summation of the how one was going to feel over the course of 109 minutes?

Of course, criticizing big-budgeted films is easy.  These film are often mostly- if not entirely- visual with little going in terms of story or character, but many can still be fun to watch, be it with an open appreciation for the ridiculous or the simple pleasure of turning your mind off and having a good time (often times, it is both).  Others are simply bad, be it because of stiff acting, stale dialogue, flaccid story or just too many action sequences that render the film boring and repetitive.  But every so often, there comes a film whose poor qualities are encapsulated by a puzzling high opinion of itself that places it in the ranks of Transformers 2 and The Last Airbender as being truly terrible films.

Few expected Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch to be anything other than another one of his cinematic graphic novels projected on the big screen.  Snyder does very well with taking comic book panels and putting them up on screen, but his lack of everything else has become more and more evident with every film he makes.

Although all of Snyder’s previous films have been adapted from other mediums, Sucker Punch is his first original film; “original” as in he came up with the story on his own and co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya.  For the reason, Sucker Punch is the culmination of everything Snyder has been working towards, and because the director is no longer anchored by source material, it highlights all his strengths and weaknesses.  Unfortunately, the weaknesses take over, and Snyder’s strengths crumble without any pre-drawn pictures on which to rely.

After surviving an attempted sexual assault from her stepfather, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is sent to a mental hospital, which she imagines to be a Forties era burlesque parlor.  When she dances, Baby Doll then enters another hyper daydream in which she and her fellow patients/dancers battle various armies and villains to retrieve objects that will set them free back in the real world.

Lord, where do I even begin?  For one, The Man of Steel is going to be terrible. 

Several people will attack the film for ripping off Inception, but that would be unfair; levels of reality have always been around in films, be it in dreams (see: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) or in the digital domain (see: Tron).  What people should attack is how poorly Sucker Punch handles its use of dream levels, amongst many, many other things.

If a film is going to involve dream levels, it is imperative that the film keeps a firm grip on reality.  Granted, dreams have the benefit of being fantasy, but like any story or plot, events and actions have to be connected to one another; for as complicated as Inception got, the structure of the various dreams were linear and well connected with one another.  Sucker Punch is not all that concerned with its structure, or how its various dream levels and actions all synch up on the other end of the looking glass; cool things happen for the sake of being cool things, and they all connect for no other reason than “because.”

The plot of the film revolves around Baby Doll finding five objects that will get her and her friends out of the mental hospital/strip club.  The girls retrieve these objects when Baby Doll (I hate that name, and I hate having to say it repeatedly) dances, whose supposedly ethereal movements entrance her male onlookers.  Of course, we never see Baby Doll dance because she goes into another dream world in which her and the ole’ gang do battle against various big baddies and thus earn the object at hand.  Of course, these fantasy battles are irrelevant and superfluous; her friends are just taking things while no one is looking.  Actually, that sums up the film rather well: every time the film becomes uninteresting, the movie wanders off into a flashier, but still boring daydream.

Of course, in an action-fantasy film, every one is more concerned with the presentation, the fantasy, the “cool stuff,” and not all that concerned with how everything fits together.  Unfortunately, the dreams themselves are all hiding to nothing, as all the visual spectacle- the stuff Snyder should be good at- is an amalgamation of dozens of other stories and styles we have seen before, not to mention done better too.

The world of Sucker Punch offers little true imagination or wonder, and Baby Doll’s disconnected dream worlds are little more than cut-and-pasted collages.  The various worlds in the film look like live action anime or anachronistic film noir, but neither are provided a unique spin by Snyder.  The various missions carried out in these worlds feature robot minions that look just like those in I, Robot, trench warfare that looks like Call of Duty gameplay, airplane chases that look straight out of Heavy Metal and Mordor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  All in all, the backdrop for the action in the film is about as interchangeable and predictable as first person shooter video game maps, except way less fun.

This is Browning's "range." Enjoy.

The acting, if not the use of the film’s characters, is about as stale as one can get.  Emily Browning has one face through the film- a sad, pained pout- and the whole gang regurgitates heist/prison escape group talk without an ounce of real gusto.  Each of the girls go far below and beyond archetypes or one dimensional filler roles; they are just background.  Their true function, of course, is to look sexy and engage in the action, but even that rendered dull and boring.  Mostly, the girls just strut toward battle or perform open-legged spins in slow motion, thus giving us more booty short-wrapped money shots and less of anything else.

With so much nothing and pilfering from other, better films, it may seem unusual that the sweet, sweet cherry resting on top of this sundae of suck is the soundtrack.  The music that accompanies the action are awful cover songs or, maybe even worse, remixes.  Yes, even the music is unimaginative, unoriginal and poorly executed, which- I suppose- is appropriate given the film at hand.  Songs from the Smiths, the Beatles, Bjork, Eurythmics and the Pixies are turned into moody, overly produced trance pieces with ethereal, breathy vocals to boot.  As if watching this atrocity was not enough, Sucker Punch takes great songs and makes them all sound like the Evanescence tracks off the Daredevil soundtrack.

Although the Razzies are not going to be around for another year, it seems as though their front-runner has already made its way into theaters everywhere.  Sucker Punch fancies itself as the next great fantasy epic, but instead it just throws a generation’s worth of pop culture to the wall and sees if anything will stick.  Instead of enjoying yourself, you find yourself watching vapid, pop-portentous screenshots too self-involved with itself to offer an experience.  All in all, Sucker Punch is a bitch move.

The following quote applies to every frame of this film: "What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. "

You know the story.  Alice falls down a rabbit hole and enters the world of Wonderland, inhabited by whacky characters.  Thankfully, unlike Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the story does differ here.  It’s revealed that this is not Alice’s first trip to Wonderland, making this a quasi-sequel to the animated film we know and love.  But Alice doesn’t quite remember things fully, and she may or may not even be the one.  Shades of The Matrix plague the first half of the film, as the characters around Alice constantly quibble about whether she is The One right Alice, and Alice must repeat to herself, “There is no spoon It’s just a dream,” in order to get out of her situations safely.  Perhaps the most relevant comparison is Hook, since this is also a live-action sequel to an animated movie in which the protagonist must remember who they truly are within the context of a fantastical land they once inhabited as a child.  Nevertheless, I was grateful that we weren’t experiencing another scene for scene retread, as calling the beats 10 minutes before they happened in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory quickly became a snoozefest.

Johnny Depp as a slightly morose Mad Hatter

Instead we see Alice in Wonderland transformed into a sort of fantasy epic, one that calls greatly upon The Lord of the Rings (Anne Hathaway’s white queen and her kingdom calls not so subtly back to the white towers of Gondor), and The Chronicles of Narnia.  I didn’t mind this though, at least when it really kicked into gear.  The final third of the film actually was exciting, with a well paced battle to finish the film and a fun fight with a dragon (even if it provided nothing new to dragon fighting, it kept the focus on Alice’s character in a good way).  No, what really brings this film down is its first half.  First we have an exceedingly boring sequence in the real world, one that I couldn’t wait to be done with.  But even when Wonderland makes its entrance, it’s a mopey and quiet Wonderland.  The film is filled with morose dialogue scenes that constantly reference the past, creating scenes with no story or character progression, and certainly no conflict to speak of.  To balance this out, almost on cue, these scenes are interrupted by over-the-top chase scenes that seem to follow some sort of formula for keeping our interest.  Unfortunately, we’ve found little reason so far to care about what happens in these action sequences, so they fail to create much of a sense of excitement.

What’s most disappointing though, throughout the film, is the sheer lack of energy and lunacy.  None of the characters present us with the bizarre psychoticness we’ve become accustom to seeing from Wonderland.  Not even Johnny Depp, who usually can be counted on for such a thing, manages to match his normal level of franticness.  He does display a certain amount of sadness below the surface in an intriguing manner, but as the Mad Hatter, I was looking for something else entirely.  The voice acting was generally better than any of the live action acting, it carried more of the energy I was looking for, as the live action actors just didn’t seem to be bringing their A-Game.  Alice herself was too bland to really care about, but I did appreciate that they kept her muttering to herself to a minimum (one of the most irritating things about the animated film).  One of my favorite scenes was seeing the table with the shrinking potion and growing cake re-imagined in almost silent fashion, much better direction than the animated film of the same name.

The movie itself has big head jokes aplenty. Even a cancerous tumor joke...

Most people go to see a Tim Burton, at least in part, due to his imaginative visuals.  This movie doesn’t disappoint in this respect.  Those who’ve grown accustomed to his style will find it repeated here, which is both good and bad.  Good because it’s beautiful and we all like it, and bad because it no longer feels fresh.  While the scenes shot entirely in live action don’t really fit with the mostly CG wonderland, once we enter the story proper, there’s plenty of eye candy to be had.  And it looks good.  The only real beef I had was that the 3D glasses actually dulled what I figured to be the intended color palette of the film.  While looking at the screen without them, the film was simply gorgeous (if completely blurred).  I imagine if seen in 2D, most would have a better experience, especially since this was not originally intended for 3D.

The movie did have a women’s empowerment that I appreciated, especially because it seemed to tie the film together in a really good way, and really give it a centralized point.  Once again, the third act was really quite enjoyable, but I struggled to trudge through the first two.  Personally, I don’t think this was really worth the $14, but then again the visuals on the big screen would certainly beat out a television for rental.  And that’s really the best part of this movie.

La Cité des Enfants Perdus
Year: 1995
Dir.: Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: Ron Perlman
Genre: Fantasy

Benn and James’ reviews and rebuttals follow after the jump.