Zach Synder's visually inventive but utterly stupid exploration of fantasy.

Rating: 5/10 (1 June 2014)

Sucker Punch is a film that seems to precisely targeted at teenage boys who like video games and want superficial action and lots of cleavage.
You cannot fault Zach Synder's unique but increasingly drilling visual style, and never more so than here in Sucker Punch; the colours are simultaneously lulled and saturated, the blacks are blackest, the slow motion in abundant, and camera work is inventive and kinetic. However not to make a film visually dazzling is near impossible for a film with a big enough budget to spend on CGI, which Sucker Punch certainly has, all £82 million of it (and that certainly went all on visuals because the writing must of cost nothing and the acting must have cost even less than that).
This worked well in Watchmen, because the visuals are meant to be comic and dark, the story is already written so you cannot go too far wrong, and the film works as actual satire on comics so the acting can be excusably bad.
The fantasy sections play like increasingly ridiculous video games, and are written like Zach Synder just combined random words together - for example, clockwork stamping WW1 German zombies - and don't even play as coherently as the dream levels in Inception.
The ending seems to subvert the traditions of cinema (or at least action films), this is likely intentional, but soon reprimands any surprises with quick and lazy "look this film is actually written" scenes which work up to nothing without the necessary build up.
I can also not tell if Sucker Punch is blatantly sexist or a feminist statement - which is never a good thing for a film to be.
Overall if you like the poster for Sucker Punch, with all its breasts, bums, crotchless pants, robots, guns, and dragons, then you will likely enjoy the film - if not forget it even before the credits have even begun.
Those who love the film will likely call any critics or skeptics pretentious, which is fine, they can.