Couldn't get into it

Rating: 3/10 (24 September 2013)

I stuck this one out until the end but I couldn't get into it and ended up hating every minute. I appreciate the thought and gesture going into the basic concept, involving girls in a hellish mental institute retreating into a reality-mirroring fantasy landscape where they can take out their anger on a series of artificial enemies, but seriously? The execution is never aimed above the level of your average 14-year-old boy.
Zach Snyder made this after the comic-book double-act of 300 and WATCHMEN, two films which I liked a lot, but SUCKER PUNCH falls flat because it's inane. It's an endless series of CGI-augmented fight scenes in which a group of scantily-clad women fight off various CGI nasties. It's the sort of film that sets the cause of feminism back 20 years and ends up demeaning the cast at the same time.
Critically, it's also exceptionally dull. I think Snyder is a gifted and sometimes visionary director, but he struggles to bring the material to life and it's never more than two dimensional. The endless action sequences look good and are filled with pretty effects but they're senseless and mean nothing. The acting, of course, is horrid, from the interchangeable girl group to the incredibly hammy Oscar Isaac.
In all honesty, I think SUCKER PUNCH is a film best forgotten about. Even Corey Yuen's ultra-cheesy DEAD OR ALIVE is better than this...