Sucker Punch (2011)

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2019)

Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Emily Browning, Oscar Isaac, Abbie Cornish, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, Scott Glenn, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens, Jon Hamm, Gerard Plunkett. (PG-13)
Pointless, humorless exercise in all-style-no-substance, presented as auteurist-vision, but the auteur is an emperor without clothes (or a clue). After being committed to an asylum by her sadistic guardian, Browning copes with the horrors of her situation by imagining herself as a prisoner-dancer in a burlesque house (leading to a different raft of horrors), then going another layer deeper into her imagination by becoming a pin-up warrior in CGI-soaked battlegrounds. She and her fellow dancers wear fetishistic adornments and fight armies of enemies (often in obnoxious slo-mo); it sometimes looks pretty, but there's no tension or excitement in these passive-participant video games, and the stakes couldn't be lower or vaguer if an invincibility cheat code had been entered. The movie trots out undeveloped female "heroes" that look clipped out of "Maxim" magazine, lets the camera leer at them at length while subjecting them to endless abuse, threats and violence, then slaps its own wrist for being naughty and protests that it's all about female empowerment; co-writer/director Snyder clearly wants to have his cake and slobber on it, too. Deplorable provocation aside, its greatest sin is just being a dreadful bore. One may need a sucker punch right to the kisser to stay awake.
10/100