Sucker Punch

A typically overblown Zack Snyder effort, Sucker Punch follows ’50s teenager Baby Doll (Emily Browning) as she brutally attacks her evil stepfather and is subsequently sent to a sketchy mental facility – where the character, along with several fellow prisoners, plots her escape by imagining a series of progressively over-the-top fantasy worlds. Sucker Punch kicks off with a dialogue-free, slow-motion-heavy stretch that almost feels like a parody of Snyder’s larger-than-life visual sensibilities, with the broadly-conceived opening admittedly (and effectively) setting the stage for a storyline that rarely has any basis in reality – as Snyder, along with cowriter Steve Shibuya, plunges Baby Doll into the first of many imagined realms mere minutes after she arrives at the aforementioned mental facility. It is, as a result, initially rather difficult to work up any interest or enthusiasm for the protagonist’s exploits, with the pervasively slick atmosphere compounded by the slow realization that Baby Doll’s actions don’t seem to have any consequences in the real world. (It does, to be fair, eventually become clear that this isn’t the case.) There reaches a point, then, at which the viewer is essentially forced to abandon logic and embrace the movie’s gleefully broad, unapologetically in-your-face sensibilities, as the film inevitably does become a surprisingly watchable and flat-out fun piece of work once one accepts its complete and utter lack of reality-based elements. It’s only as Sucker Punch charges into its comparatively low-key and incongruously dramatic third act that one’s interest begins to wane, which effectively cements the movie’s place as an innovative yet consistently inconsistent piece of work.

**1/2 out of ****