Sucker Punch is about a girl (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution and dreams up a fantasy world where she and other girls from the institution are dancers at a whorehouse.  In order to escape they must retrieve a list of items, and do this by going into another fantasy world where they battle monsters.  This girl must complete the task fast because she will be lobotomized in 5 days.

Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish & Vanessa Hudgens

This movie has some major problems.  So I feel that it’s best that I start with the positives.  I love Jena Malone and seeing her in this was wonderful, although the movie didn’t really give her much of an opportunity to do anything but look pretty.  Same for lead Emily Browning.  It was shot very well and looked good.  The editing was good.  And the art direction was wonderful.

Now to move on to the not so good.  This movie is insanely filled with non-sense and plot holes.  Is the whole thing actually a play (as the very opening would suggest), or is the real reality in the institution? There’s a lot of confusion in the story and plot lines and no rules to the filmmaking that helps the audience at all.  When you do a film, any film no matter how fantastical, you must have rules.  Snyder apparently missed that lesson from just about every film ever (Inception is a wonderful example of this done right, as are the Matrix movies).  There is too much blur between fantasies.

Speaking of fantasies, the girls fantasy to get out of their horrible lives in a mental institution is to imagine they’re in a whorehouse?  What?

So the way the movie basically is structured is that most of the time we’re within this whorehouse fantasy, but we go deeper into other fantasies when Baby Doll (Browning) dances (which we never see) and there the girls take on missions in pursuit of objects they need to break out.  All of these are like video game music videos.  They’re set to either mash-ups or bad covers of famous songs and feature the girls fighting fantastic creatures like steampunk WWI zombies or dragons.

Emily Browning as Baby Doll

So mostly the movie is like watching a way over stylized video game which was turned into a music video.  This is not fun.  Also these action sequences don’t have much of a point, this would be a much more fun movie without them.  In fact I argue that the basic plot of this movie is good.  If it was a bunch of girls locked up and abused in a mental institution for no real reasons (like running away from home) and finding a way to mentally escape through fantasy this could be a good movie.  But it’s just done so poorly.

Yes there’s lots of pretty girls wearing basically nothing.  But the entire movie just seems like it was written by and for a 13 year old to masturbate to.  I’m shocked there’s not a lesbian scene.

Now I did read that a lot of the movie was cut to get a PG-13 rating and the movie was originally written as an R then re-written for a PG-13 and then further cut from there but it’s still no excuse for this being as horrible as it is.  If cutting things took away from the story they should have re-shot something to explain it.

For a better time than this movie I suggest you listen to Paul Scheer’s How Did This Get Made? podcast episode about it.