The most expensive (and pointless) film about a scavenger hunt

Rating: 4/10 (5 January 2012)

"Sucker Punch" has to be the most expensive movie ever made ($82 million in all) about a scavenger hunt. Babydoll (played by the really sexy Australian actress Emily Browning) gets sent into an asylum by her really evil dad so that she does not inherit her mother's property. While in the asylum, Babydoll teams up with Rocket (Jena Malone who gave a far better performance as the teen love interest in Donnie Darko), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical fame), and Amber (Jamie Chung) in planning their great escape. Naturally the film also has villains, like the psychopathic Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) and Dr. Vera Gorski (Carl Gugino doing a very bad Polish accent).
I personally like the first 5-10 minutes of the film with the 80s soundtrack in the background and Director Zack Snyder showing off his computer-induced cinematography skills and the last 20 minutes when they are escaping. But everything in between was quite bad. The first big problem I have with this film is the plot. Apparently this insane asylum is very difficult to escape from and you would think, therefore, that Babydoll would respond to this challenge by coming up with a very clever and original escape plan that could catch all the guards unawares. But Babydoll's escape plan, far from being grandiose on the scale of Clint Eastward's in "Escape from Alcatraz" (an escape film with far more excitement on a much smaller budget), is as mind numbingly simple as getting a map, a lighter, a knife and a key and then busting out. Apparently the girls will all steal these things, while Babydoll keeps the guards distracted with a strip tease. The only thing that was more ridiculous than the plan itself was that the other four girls thinking that it was such a brilliant idea. While I concede that great escape plans usually have at least a whiff of implausibility (though this one really takes the cake for implausibility), the problem with the escape plan in "Sucker Punch" is that it's so basic that watching this plan unfold is a lot like watching paint on a wall dry. Moreover, the screenplay writers were unable to imbue the escape scenes in "Sucker Punch" with suspense, with the result that the audience is given no reason to care if the girls got out of the asylum or not. The next point, in relation to the plot, is that I do not think Babydoll knows how to dance, because otherwise why substitute her dance scenes with CGI video game action scenes featuring samurais with machine guns (obviously Snyder does not know much about Japanese history), inflatable Germans (talk about being xenophobic), and a big dragon? If Babydoll is such a sexy dancer, then her dancing would have easily upstaged the video game sequences (which were below average program fair) and Snyder could have saved tens of millions of dollars on the CGI.
My next criticism is about the music. Aside from that 80's number in the beginning, Sucker Punch's soundtrack is terrible. I don't know when people concluded that noise could be music, but the makers of this film must have seen the wall-to-wall noise accompanying the action sequences as a thing of beauty because it pervades this film from beginning to end. The lyrics are boring and the noise that comes with it is boring.
Finally, many critics point to the bad acting in this film. But I think this criticism is irrelevant because the film would still be bad even if the actors were good. There is no way to deliver good performances in this film, because the plot and the dialogue are so terrible. There was also criticism that Sucker Punch is an exploitation film. Admittedly there is some exploitation, but that criticism is a bit overblown. I have seen films that are far more shamelessly exploitative than "Sucker Punch." The main problem with Sucker Punch is not that it is an exploitation flick mixed in with a disingenuous "strong woman" type of message, but rather that it's just a bad movie.
3.7/10