Wants to be clever but doesn't know how

Rating: 4/10 (12 October 2016)

In spite of the bad reviews, the trailer made me think this would, at the least, have some fun action scenes that would make it worthwhile. It was a reasonable theory, yet by the halfway point I was completely bored.
The premise seems clever. After a miserably grim sequence in which a young girl undergoes trauma and is unjustly institutionalized and slated for a terrible fate, she re-imagines her plight as a girl kidnapped to a brothel, and then, from the brothel, re-imagines her life as an action movie involving swords and guns, blimps, and a lot of gymnastic jumping.
But there doesn't seem to be anything behind that cleverness, at least in the first half, which was all I watched. The three different realities have a few connectors - items and people - but they don't seem to have any narrative purpose. It's as though the writers saw Intercept and thought all they needed was to strew some intersecting plot elements about and they'd get the same thing.
Having read the wikipedia plot summary, I'm glad I didn't finish this one, as the end strikes me as both unsatisfactory and another example of an idea unmoored from real purpose beyond trying to do something cool.
That's what this movie is - a trying to do something cool. And yes, there are cool things, like steampunk soldiers that bleed steam and hot action girls in skimpy clothes. But any fun that might suggest is counteracted by a relentless, murky sourness that pervades the film. It feels as though the director was afraid people might enjoy this too much to appreciate its depth, but since it has no depth, that was a mistake.
This is rather typical of Zack Snyder, who seems to be torn between a desire to make something pretentiously arty and a desire to make something full of popcorn action. Sometimes, as in Man of Steel, he balances the two, but sometimes, as in Sucker Punch or Batman vs. Superman, he creates films at war with themselves.