Misconceived

Rating: 2/10 (2 January 2012)

Baby doll gets set to an insane asylum for accidentally killing her sister when she meant to kill her abusive stepfather. The rest of the movie is a prolonged fantasy as she tries to escape the asylum before she is lobotomized.
There is no delicate way to put this, this movie completely fails and its entirely at the feet of Zack Snyder.
Simply put the dream sequences are stupid and considering 95% of the movie is a fantasy, that gives you maybe ten minutes of usable movie, but even that is tainted by pointless CGI and directed like a music video.
Imagine Shutter Island, now remove the suspense, and add CGI ninjas, dragons, helicopters, and zombie Nazis and you have Sucker Punch. I literally fast-forwarded through one of the action sequences set on a train. Oh, that had robots. Add that to the list of unnecessary CGI filler that this movie could have done without.
The most galling part about the dream sequences is the shear absurdity of them. I believe this movie is a period piece, set in the 1960s, yet we have a 20 year old woman dreaming of 21rst century technology, like digital displays on the mech and helicopter. The fantasies in the movie are not the fantasies of the character Baby Doll like the movie would have us believe, they are the fantasies of the director Zack Snyder. I did not believe for one second that Baby Doll would even have these fantasies.
If the main character had been male and the movie had been set today, the fantasies would have still be unnecessary, pointless filer, but at least I could have believed the were fantasies of the main character. As it stands...garbage.
This movie will never hold a candle to Shutter Island. If you ever feel the need to watch Sucker Punch, stick two TVs next to each other and watch Shutter Island and Chicago at the same time.