Unsatisfying, but it grows on you

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2011)

I'm not a huge fan of either Watchmen or 300, but they're reasonable in my opinion - I think Zack Snyder is missing some spark of greatness that will make his films truly epic - I don't know if it's experience or attitude, but hopefully someday he'll overcome it.
Overall, I found Sucker Punch unsatisfying due to its flaws - the problem I have is determining whether the flaws are actual or perceived. I do know that I was rather disappointed reading an interview with Snyder where he revealed that the title alluded to how he wanted to sucker punch the audience. Yeah, great plan Zack.
I'll give my summary, for it colors how I viewed the movie: A girl's mother dies and her complete bastard of a stepfather gets control of her and her younger sister. During an attack, she tries to shoot him but instead kills her sister. The stepfather puts her in an institution and pays off the crooked doctor to have her lobotomized in five days, and five days later the doctor shows up and starts the procedure.
At that point, she withdraws in her mind to a weird combination of fantasy and memory. In this fantasy, everyone calls her Baby Doll and the asylum is actually a brothel where the head doctor sells the patients out as whores, each of whom has their own dance used to entice customers. In this fantasy, the girl cooks up a plan to escape with the aid of her fellow inmates.
Baby Doll, in this fantasy, dances so incredibly that anyone who watches is spellbound and oblivious to events around them. When Baby Doll dances, she imagines a fantasy world in her mind, where she is a superhero-like warrior, and her and the other girls have all sorts of fantastic adventures.
Using this power, the girls (still in the dream here) hatch a plan to escape by stealing what they need while Baby Doll is dancing.
Not all works out as planned, however, and only one of the girls (Sweet Pea) actually makes it out, with Baby Doll sacrificing herself so that the last girl can be free and return to her parents.
At that point the movie returns to the actual real world, Baby Doll is lobotomized, but the crooked doctor is found out and arrested, and presumably gives up the evil stepdad as well. In the process, we find out that many of the events Baby Doll dreamed about in those last few seconds of lucidity did actually happen in the real world. All in all, it was a pretty dismal ending, even if it did continue on to show Sweet Pea making it to safety at the end.
The movie was very impressive visually, with an awesome soundtrack and a lot of real suspense.
But now for the flaws, in no particular order.
1. Many people failed to recognize the first transition, and believed the brothel was real. That's not necessarily the fault of the movie, but given how many of the reviews seem to miss it, I do put the blame on the shoulders of the film itself.
2. The action sequences were awesome, but each subsequent one was less awesome that the previous - not a good trend. One would have expected exactly the opposite, with the action sequences building in intensity and excitement as the film progressed, rather than getting worse.
3. I may just be giving the film the benefit of the doubt when I say the stepfather would be caught, but even if he was, destroying Baby Doll at the end was a horrific anti-climax which the slim remainder of the movie could not make up for. I don't know if he was intentionally going for a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest vibe or I'm just being too gracious, but either way I don't think he pulled it off.
4. The tying together of the dream world/brothel events with the ones in the real world (the map, the fire, the knife, the key) was subtle, so much so that it seemed like an afterthought, and it was unsatisfying to find out after Baby Doll was lobotomized that she had actually been doing all those things (and see #6 below).
5. Sweet Pea was the *least* sympathetic of all of the girls, so having her be the one who made it out was especially unsatisfying. We see all the girls killed except Sweet Pea and Baby Doll (including Sweet Pea's sister who gives HER life for the cause), and then Baby Doll sacrifices herself for Sweet Pea.
6. Finally, I recognize that Baby Doll had little to live for (after all, her Mom died and she accidentally killed the only person important to her, her sister), but even so she was not portrayed as being so hopeless that she wanted to end it all, even if the final doctor said "she looked like she wanted me to do it." It was too jarring to make sense. No, I wasn't expecting the ending to be all tied up in a nice pretty bow, but nor did I expect such a horrific ending, especially given that it was revealed that she'd tried so hard to get out and stay alive.
Anyways, the flaws, overall, are severe enough to me so that I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone, and yet I give it a rating of 7 simply because I think that Zack Snyder accidentally created something better than he really ought to have.