"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Film: Sucker Punch
Year: 2011
Director: Zack Snyder.
Written by: Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya.
Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn.
Running time: 110 min.

If there was a lesson that I've learned this year, it would have to be all thanks to Sucker Punch. You see, at the beginning of the year, this was my most anticipated film for 2011, because the trailers I'd seen made it look really pretty. As soon as it came out, everyone was trashing it, so I decided not to go and see it in cinemas (I didn't have time either). Okay, so I wasn't exactly excited for it to come out on DVD, but I still held on to a little shred of hope that this movie might actually be as cool as I thought it would be. Now that I've watched the film, I am doubting myself and the decisions I make. I'm sorry, why the hell did I want to see this movie so much?! Lesson learned from this mess: never choose the huge blockbuster movies that are really just made for teenage boys as your most anticipated. Sucker Punch is the reason why virtually all of the movies I want to see in the remainder of the year are festival favourites that don't have budgets over $5 million.

If there was one thing that really drew me into Sucker Punch before it was released, it would have to be the interesting-sounding story that looked like it was set to become 2011's answer to Inception. Well, it does have more than one layer of mental state. But the difference between this and Inception is the fact that I could understand Inception straight away, whereas I didn't understand Sucker Punch at all. First of all, we see young Baby Doll (Emily Browning) being sent to a mental institution by her stepfather. She's up for a lobotomy in five days. But no, Baby Doll is not crazy, and she needs to get out of the institution. How does one single white female get out of a mental institution? Well, she enlists the help of some other institutionalised women-folk: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). From the asylum they launch into their second reality: dancing at a burlesque club owned by the shady Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac). From Baby Doll's apparently brilliant dancing, they all go off into their third reality, which has them trying to retrieve five different items so they can get the hell out of Lennox House for the Mentally Insane.

For positivity and optimism's sake, I would love to say that no, Sucker Punch wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be. I would love to say that some people may have just misunderstood what it was trying to say. I would love to say that it was so unfairly treated and all those critics were wrong. Unfortunately, it was just as bad as everyone made it out to be, I found it virtually incomprehensible, and the critics were all right. I wouldn't say I hated it - because hate is a very strong word and I don't wish to ever apply it to a film - but I found Sucker Punch to be a genuinely repulsive mess of a film.

I admire Zack Snyder for his ambition here, because his idea was kinda original. But it just didn't work on screen. The story-telling wasn't very coherent, and I found it extremely hard to understand what was going on with the different layers. Instead, Snyder seems to rely on fancy graphics and over the top action sequences to get his point across. Which is cool, because I have to admit that some of the action sequences are incredibly well staged, but for the most part, the audience is just thrown into all of these different situations with little knowledge of how they got there. Snyder, unfortunately, lacks the ability to tell a good story, which is a prerequisite when handling a multi-layered plot. Let's look at it this way: Sucker Punch was probably a teapot with a beautiful intricate design on the outside, made out of Chinese Porcelain, when Snyder first thought of it. But once he started to develop the story a bit more, he dropped that teapot and it broke into a hundred pieces. He was supposed to be the glue that held that teapot together again, but the pieces were just thrown together and the teapot wasn't that beautiful anymore. It was just a crappy looking, poorly put-together thing that had no real love or intelligence put into it. Moral of the story: don't mess with the teapot.

The one thing that really annoyed me about Sucker Punch was the fact that just about every character in this movie was despicable. First of all, every man in this movie, except for maybe the Wiseman (Scott Glenn), was made out to be utterly evil. They weren't just part bad, they were really bad, all the way through to their core. This was a little bit odd to watch, as being from a female's point of view, the men would have been put in a bad light anyway. Except, the women in this movie aren't much better. Sucker Punch is a revenge tale of sorts, and it sets out to give females empowerment. It's just a bit hard to believe in this inspiring story of how women overcome the power of men when the whole film is basically a teenage boy's wet dream. I, personally, found it hard to go along with these women who were wearing next to nothing and going out into all of these strange situations and beating the crap out of everything that moves. If this sort of fantasy is supposed to empowering and inspiring to a female like myself, then it certainly did fail. Sure, the men were really, really mean to them, but I'm sure that they were just there to highlight Sucker Punch's underlying theme of objectification of women.

In short, this movie is dismally bad. The acting doesn't really help any of the characters, especially as Hudgens' and Chung's characters fade into the background, leaving the talented Cornish and Malone (and their nice backstory) to support Browning's underwhelming heroine. All of the actors are on deflated autopilot, just like the rest of the film. There are some redeeming features in Sucker Punch, but they are buried beneath pile upon pile of glossy crap that it almost hurts to look at the film. Unless you're a teenage boy, because then I'm sure it will be quite fun.

What I got: