Huge Disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (29 August 2011)

Zack Snyder is a brilliant director. That doesn't automatically make him a competent neurosurgeon, or a trophy-winning stunt pilot. And it sure as heck doesn't make him a halfway passable writer.
Sucker Punch is a beautifully directed mess. The story - especially the ending - is so incoherent it's difficult to judge the film's meaning or message. Or even decide whether it had one. The title, in particular, seems to have no other meaning than as a warning to the viewer: this film IS a 'sucker punch.' Drop your guard, and it will steal two hours of your life. And I say this as a huge fan of Snyder's previous work, and someone with a very high tolerance for surrealist fantasies (from directors like Gilliam, del Toro and others.)
Sucker Punch does have some redeeming virtues. The largely female cast is appealing, though saddled with some of the most dreadfully lame dialog ever uttered by human lips. The visual style is great, as you'd expect from Snyder. The imagery, mixing B-25, Zeppelins, zombie stormtroopers and dragons, is borderline brilliant - but wasted. Alas, the music is particularly gruesome, consisting of lifeless, over-produced generic re-workings of classic rock tunes like White Rabbit. Had the music had any spark of creativity, the film might actually have worked as some sort of lengthy music video.
I guess after adapting the work of great writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, Snyder got to thinking it didn't look so hard. He was wrong. Writing is the most difficult of all creative skills. Let's hope that for his next project Snyder comes to his senses and remembers his core skills as a director, and leaves the writing to those with some minimal talent for it.