Sucker Punch: Review

I'd like to think of myself as being a little bit intelligent. I have sat through some strange, often baffling films and managed to work out what was going on. Zack Synder's hugely anticipated Sucker Punch I still don't have a clue.

A young girl is thrown into an institute after accidentally killing her younger sister while trying to save her from her lecherous stepfather. While there, she creates a vivid world in which she and four other 'inmates' are trapped in a dance-club and that the five have to find objects in order to escape. The girl, now called Baby Doll, has a dance routine that is enough of a distraction for the others to get the items but in doing so, Baby Doll is transported into another world where she and the girls are mighty warriors battling all kinds of enemies.

At least, I think that is right. This is the problem with the film. Synder has an excellent premise of five tough women fighting through CGI settings and if he had left it at that, we could have had the action film of the year. Instead, he bombards us with pseudo-psychology that doesn't make any sense at all, leaving the audience amazed by the action but confused by the story.

The girls obviously had loads of fun brandishing guns and swords. Emily Browning, as Baby Doll, is innocent-looking enough while it's good to see Abbie Cornish given more to do than she was in Limitless. Jena Malone, who starred in that other head-scratcher Donnie Darko, is fine and Vanessa Hudgens gets to play grown-up after those dire High School Musical films and she kicks some serious butt. They are all perfectly fine and proof that girls are just as good at action as the boys.

The set pieces and production values are extraordinary. One moment we are in a samurai style battle with giant warriors, the next the trenches of a war, then a fight with a dragon and on it goes. If Synder had just concentrated on these scenes and placed together a proper cartoon style story around that, I think the fan-boys, that audience of teens to 30s who love nothing more than comic books, video games and naming all the characters out of Star Wars, would lap this stuff up. Instead it's enough to turn you cold with the ideas that have been thrown onto the screen to see which ones stick.

There is a lesson to be learnt here: keep it simple. If you are intending to be clever, then go really clever, don't baffle the viewer with an inconsistent, in-coherent story of a fantasy within a fantasy. Next up for Synder is the reboot of Superman. I just hope he doesn't try to be clever with that.