A typical Zach Snyder film: 1/3 slow motion, 1/3 pointless over-the-top action, and 1/3 comic book styled visuals and storytelling

Rating: 5/10 (24 March 2011)

This is only my second review ever but Sucker Punch ground my gears so much that I just had to make this review. I saw this movie Wednesday the 23rd in St. Louis at an early screening for press and locals and I will be avoiding major spoilers but might mention some small scene specific things.
Basically, this movie is what you get when Zack Snyder turns all of his little girl fetish fantasies/daydreams into a movie. The action is unbelievably over-the-top, too long, and boring. The girls, while beautiful, look rather young and childish (especially the main girl Baby Doll) in what can only be seen as a pedophilia-type fetish. The story and visuals are similar to a comic book with there being a constant narration and a stylized darkish tint to everything like 300 or The Spirit. Since this movie does follow a comic book style of story telling and goes in and out of reality, the plot ends up being very jarring and confusing especially at critical story points throughout the movie.
One of the biggest problems with this movie is length, clocking in at nearly 2 hours long. I enjoy long movies, if they are good. If a movie is good I want it to go on forever and never end, but with Sucker Punch I couldn't wait for it to finish. Probably the biggest contributing factor to the length of this movie is the slow motion. Roughly 1/3rd of Sucker Punch is in slow motion (that is if you cut out all the scenes that weren't in slow motion, the running time of just the slow motion scenes would be about 35-40 minutes) including the first 10 minutes of the film which is completely in slow motion. The next biggest contributor were the action scenes. Not only were they too long that you got bored of them after a few minutes (and not to mention the fact that all the action scenes were exactly the same for every fantasy sequence no matter who they were fighting) but they were so over-the-top that they just weren't entertaining. The girls were always impervious to damage (falling 1,000 feet or getting hit by 100 foot tall robots didn't even phase them) and had matrix-type skills to dodge bullets. There just wasn't any suspense or excitement to the action.
Another problem with this movies the the CGI. About half the movie is in CGI and poor CGI at that. While some of the CGI looks good, specifically larger shots with most things in the distance, when it gets close up to some things it looks like a cutscene from a video game (maybe that was what he was going for though). It really takes you out of the movie.
The only good actor is Jon Hamm, and he has the smallest part in the film. The lead female cast are emotionless and Carla Gugino has a laughably bad Russian accent. Character wise, Gugino's character is pointless and could be removed from the film without anything missing, Hamm's character is basically just a cameo even though his character is made out to be a big deal, the main female cast are static and don't change (Baby Doll pretty much does everything, one girl is the naive rebellious one, another is the strong-willed reluctant one, one is the Asian girl who is always dealing with technology like piloting giant mech robots, and the other is Vanessa Hudgens who does absolutely nothing except look ridiculous with her giant hair). The main antagonist does have some good moments (especially one near the end when he does something you wish he would have done right from the beginning) but other than that he and the rest of the bad guys are dull or non-existent for most of the film.
The one thing that could have made this movie slightly enjoyable was nudity. This movie is constantly teasing you by showing all of the girls in very skimpy skin tight outfits and in their dressing room a lot (where most of their conversations take place) but there is no nudity at all. It is just a big tease with a huge letdown once you realize you won't get to see any skin. I'm not giving this movie a lower rating because of the lack of nudity (I knew it was a PG-13 movie), but because it is being teased so much and sex is hinted at or implied a lot it could have included some sex scenes and nudity and not cheapened the story or the film at all and maybe could have even strengthened the story and what the girls were going through.
This movie just proves Zack Snyder is a terrible film maker. Because he had butchered source material so much in his previous films to try to make things different and his own, you might think that giving him his very own original movie might let him really show his creativity. But as you can tell by the crap he adds or changes to the source material in his previous movies, he has no good ideas of his own. Sucker Punch is just a bunch of random CGI and cock-teasing with a very simple but not very coherent story and unnecessary action.