Visually impressive and rich in potential, but ultimately shallow.

Rating: 4/10 (6 April 2013)

Zack Snyder's 'Sucker Punch', like his previous '300', is an action- heavy and extremely stylised movie, featuring a small group fighting a seemingly-impossible battle against an overwhelming force - in '300', the advancing and inexplicably S&M-fixated Persian hordes; here, the staff and environs of a mental hospital.
Most of the action takes place inside the mind of the main character Babydoll, who hallucinates an alternate world inside the asylum, in which she and her fellow inmates are instead exotic dancers in a brothel run by twisted and unpleasant representations of the already twisted and unpleasant asylum staff. Because stealing keys, maps, cigarette lighters and knives to escape with is more the area of Steve McQueen and James Garner, these escape preparations are portrayed as a further level of hallucination, in which the girls do battle in increasingly exotic locales against increasingly far-fetched adversaries (Steampunk German Zombie Soldiers from WWI, Robots, Orcs, etc.). These sections are always visually impressive, but we never really feel like we know the characters or get any sense of the characters' actions having meaningful - or at least understandable effects. When one character dies inside the futuristic battle hallucination, it represents her being caught and killed in the brothel hallucination. What this translates to in the asylum reality is anyone's guess.
The nested hallucinations that provide the necessary action, fantasy and easily-disposed-of CGI hordes may have been inspired by 'Inception's' dream levels, but the effects of the characters' actions and surroundings do not translate between realities anywhere near as clearly as in Nolan's film. Characterisation is paper-thin as well, with the main ensemble of girls being lucky to get more than one defining trait: one is stubbornly against escaping and wants to stay put, one is initially afraid but instilled with new hope by Babydoll's determination, and the other two are more or less interchangeably panicky and anxious. Babydoll herself has very little character, except for the ability to dance well in the brothel fantasy, which translates across to goodness-knows-what in reality. While the Spartans of '300' are similarly shallowly characterised, we didn't mind because what they were doing was important, based on history, and every actor seemed to be aware of the film's silliness and give performances that were about three billion per cent larger than life. 'Sucker Punch' could have done with some overplayed, shouty Spartans to give the proceedings some much- needed energy.
In the end, impressive though the visuals are and interesting though the premise is, we are simply watching characters we don't really know or care about doing things that don't really seem to matter. So why would we want to do that?