Ever since "300," Zack Snyder has been the true-love of the Warner Bros. lot, socialist to effort his boost at the most legendary particular novel adaptation of all ("Watchmen") and even given released rein on a kids' film about talking warrior owls from Australia. They've anointed him the savior of the "Superman" franchise. But with "Sucker Punch" Warners gave him not just unshackled rein, but his own petard. And he hoists himself upon it in the most epic miscalculation since the Golden Summer of M. Night Shyamalan.
An unerotic, unthrilling lubricous thriller in the video-game mold, "Sucker Punch" is "The Last Airbender" with bustiers. Snyder rounded up five of the most comely babyish actresses in the biz, women who give five of the flattest performances ever in a humorless pilgrimage pretence about Pussycat Doll inmates taxing to diversion from an reckless asylum. I'd instance a piquant road or two, if the organize (co-written by Snyder) had any. I'd broach the moving peaks if the talking picture managed one.
"Sucker Punch" is a flatly played, flat-looking bring to bear in green-screen filmmaking, "Sin City" without the sin. Emily Browning plays a juvenile heiress committed to Lennox House by a hateful, innominate keeper who framed her for the liquidation of her sister. There, she takes the (striptease) dancing cure-all of a Polish psychotherapist (Carla Gugino) and joins four other sophomoric women in an abscond that they layout to sweep out in an go reality.
Scott Glenn is the "Wise Man" who gives "Baby Doll," as Browning's respectability is known, the marching orders for her quest. She must purchase five talismans to escape. She has five days to get out before a lobotomy is administered (by Jon Hamm of TV's "Mad Men"). So she enlists Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Amber (Jamie Chung), her peer dancer/hooker/inmates, to league with her. Every adjust Baby Doll "dances" her wonderful aphrodisiac crash and sharpen for the paying customers, the five of them revolve up in a varied encounter sector of their imaginations - a World War I battlefield with steam-powered German zombies, Zeppelins and a quarrel party impassive out of "Robocop," a medieval fortress lay siege to with dragons and an oddly configured WWII bomber.
They raze out their samurai swords and Navy Seals motor guns and cut down whoever is in the fashion of their map, their key, what have you. These furies in fishnet stockings are neither convincing substitutes for Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" (plainly an inspiration) nor involving characters. At times, their digitally enhanced battles look out on be fond of form of the taste (circa 2005) video position graphics. Scantily attired, they still aren't sexy.
In transient danger, they still aren't sympathetic. "If you do not dance," Dr. Vera Gorski (Gugino) purrs in exaggerated Polish-accented English, "you have no purpose." Snyder doesn't let any of his junior vixens dance. Or let us the hang of them dance.
The only "Sucker Punch" here is to your pocketbook if money non-matinee prices for this. Just be appreciative it wasn't in 3-D. Maybe "Superman: Man of Steel" will be Snyder's comeback - if Warner lets him dictate it.
Author's link: read there
