Tries to be everything at the same time

Rating: 2/10 (30 May 2012)

Some people wonder why this movie flopped.
My question is: How this movie could not be a flop when, after so much time of Internet hype, with several viewers expecting this to be the ultimate fantasy-action film (With zombies, dragons, and giant samurai monsters) it ended being an ugly and depressive drama where all the fantasy elements showed by all the previews and trailers were just hallucinations that have zero relevance to the actual plot of the movie. Too bad that this movie lacks of the same emotional impact and originality of films where the main characters were divided between reality and fantasy, such as "Brazil" or "Pan's Labyrinth".
The main problem of "Sucker Punch" is that it tries to be everything (And I mean, absolutely everything) at the same time, and doing that, it manages to be incredibly disappointing at every single level. It tries to be an exciting summer blockbuster that at the same time it's a depressive and dark art-house drama, which is also a "complex" psychological thriller (By adding the completely unnecessary brothel subplot, in order to achieve some forced comparisons between this and "Inception") Unfortunately, the combination of all those elements and themes results into something very frustrating and muddled, being that the main reason of why this movie got so poor reviews: In the attempt to please every audience, it managed to disappoint most of the viewers. It's not something like "The public just doesn't get this film"; I mean, I get this film, but I still don't like it, mostly because the subplot of the movie that takes place in the real world (The one that actually matters) it's quite shallow and frustrating, with the characters doing several idiotic decisions in order to shoehorn the "tragic" elements of the story to make it more depressive But since that is not enough for this movie (And considering the fact that it desperately tries to be everything at the same time) it also wants to have an "uplifting" note at the end, by making one secondary character achieve a somewhat happy ending. That wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't for the fact that the character in question is somebody quite uninteresting and with zero personality at all that most of the time just does a filler role. As a viewer, I am supposed to feel happy with the incredibly frustrating ending just because some boring secondary character that never does something remotely important in the whole story gets a happy ending? Honestly, with all those frustrating characteristics, this was doomed to fail from the beginning.
"Sucker Punch" is just a self-indulgent mess which could have been (at least) something interesting, but instead of that it comes as a big failure guaranteed to disappoint everyone.