A complete waste of a good idea

Rating: 2/10 (27 March 2011)

The fact that somebody is a director doesn't mean they know how to write a film script. Even the fact they are great writers doesn't mean that, Sartre's script for the Freud movie being a case in point. Zack Snider's latest attempt at movie-making, "Sucker Punch" is a punch indeed... to the viewer's patience. The storyline is almost nonexistent, the CGI battle sequences are mostly boring, the plot premises are weak (to say the least), and the bet on the bet on Emilie Browning's (Baby Doll) beauty to enthrall the viewer fails miserably: she looks SO artificial that I couldn't even find her mildly pretty. Perhaps that was intentional, but then, the movie would require a modicum of storyline to keep going. And there is none. From the start, when the girl is incomprehensibly shoved into an asylum instead of answering an inquiry (where the attempted rape by the stepfather would - inconveniently to Zack's bad plot - have come up, she is put into an Arkham-like asylum. Add to it the fact that the whorehouse fantasy with the game character fantasy inside it simply do not carry on a convincing story, because there is no background to them. The move just does not connect the dots. And Baby Doll's character is supposed NOT to be insane (and her being 20 years old makes it even more unconvincing - if she were 5, the badly connected senseless fantasies would be make more sense). To top it up, the video game sequences are just plain boring. Just special effects with 300-imitation CGI visual are not enough to carry long sequences of senseless battles with no real plot to support them. Compare this with Hero, a great movie, with stupendous actions sequences, a stunning visual (way better - because poetical and plot-helping, instead of merely technological - than Zack can ever hope to achieve) and a wonderfully deep, complex and simple plot to boot! Profoundly disappointing. A great idea for a plot just plain wasted.