Swish and spectacle combine to little effect in Zack Snyder's latest outing...

Some ambitious visuals aside, the tedious and nonsensical Sucker Punch suggests Watchmen was a rare success for Zack Snyder – and makes you worried about Superman.

A stage curtain drawing back suggests that in sitting down to Sucker Punch, we’re entering a world of theatricality and bending of the rules. Sadly Zack Snyder’s latest effort isn’t nearly comparable with the lush ‘Red Curtain’ fantasies of Baz Lurhmann. Instead, it resides in a bizarre hinterland between Uwe Boll, Paul Verhoeven and Edgar Wright.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is likely to be a lazy point of comparison for many, with Sucker Punch also framed around a series of set-piece fights. But where Wright’s Canadian geekgasm had heart and wit, Sucker Punch has shoddy CGI, drab colours and characters and a central premise that makes it near impossible to care about its scantily clad cast.

We follow Baby Doll (Emily Browning) as she is committed to an asylum after she accidentally kills her younger sister when trying to ward off an evil stepfather in a nearly dialogue-free opening. As her lobotomy is about to begin, we slide into a fantasy world where Baby Doll and her fellow inmates – Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung – are the heavily made up, short-skirted ‘talent’ in a dancehall-cum-bordello.

As Baby Doll is forced into performing her first dance, Snyder nudges us into her dream within a dream (all that Sucker Punch has in common with Inception) of a feudal Japanese dojo where she meets a Pai Mei-esque old man (Scott Glenn) who outlines the objects she and the other girls need to escape. Through Baby Doll’s arousing dances and the fantasy worlds they evoke, the committed girls can find their freedom...

It’s an outlandish but intriguing premise, with the multiple realities allowing for leaps of the imagination and a playing field for the visual flair Snyder’s shown in his best and worst films. Sadly, the abiding reactions to Sucker Punch are of disappointment and frustration. Snyder sometimes dazzles but frequently repeats himself – the drained camera filter and joylessness of 300, the slow-motion spinning tops and wordless montages of Watchmen – and his claim that the film is a proud statement of female empowerment is laughably hollow.

"The girls’ outfits could have been one aspect of their supposedly strong femininity. Instead, their states of undress are their entire personas."

The high-heels, bustiers and schoolgirl skirts donned by the group are fitting to their brothel home, but there’s only so many drawn-out panning shots up Browning and Cornish’s thighs you can take before you question just how this film is in any way feminist. Even the girls’ ass-kicking antics in the fantasy worlds offer a weak defence of Snyder’s claim – the landscapes are created through Baby Doll dreaming while dancing provocatively, like a prostitute blocking the pain with drink and tranquilisers.

While The Bride and Lisbeth Salander rage violently against the patriarchy, Baby Doll, Sweet Pea and co only do so in their dreams and in outfits that seem explicitly targeted at 15-year-old boys. With a better script or stronger actresses – Cornish and Malone are adequate while Browning and Chung are blank and Hudgens does little but smirk – the girls’ outfits could have been one aspect of their supposedly strong femininity. Instead, their states of undress are their entire personas.

Sucker Punch frequently feels like a videogame, with attractive starlets appearing in filmed interludes before their avatars swirl into otherworldly missions. However, the worlds of the film don’t carry the depth of an Uncharted, for example – even if Sucker Punch were a console effort, it’d be the type of visually stunning but repetitive and emotionally bereft effort that allows Roger Ebert to claim that videogames can never be considered art.

Retreating into multiple fantasies allows Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya to indulge their imaginations, and both prove feverish, with a beautifully-framed dojo fight to Bjork’s 'Army of Me', a lengthy but enjoyably silly encounter with steampunk zombie German troops in trenches, and further (dull) battles in a Mordor-esque fortress and against robotic guards in a distant galaxy. But these leaps into fantasy are the film’s fatal flaw, removing any sense of consequence or emotion from the fights.

Snyder packs the soundtrack with cover versions concerned with dreams and mental breakdown with a booming take on the Beatles’ 'Tomorrow Never Knows' well placed with the sci-fi interlude. But a more fitting choice might have been 'Strawberry Fields', with its insistence that ‘nothing is real and nothing to get hung about’. With such thinly-drawn characters and the majority of the film taking place inside a protagonist’s head, there’s no consequence and so, no engagement.

There’s also no logic. Our ‘heroines’ are basically gun-toting, skimpily-dressed teenage boy fantasies, yet the fantasy worlds they retreat to are either a terrifying brothel or fight landscapes from the imagination of a manga fan who’s also partial to Tolkien, classic sci-fi and Boy’s Own war novels. And when Glenn’s character turns up at the climax in what is purported to be the real world, you’re left grasping your armrest in fury at having seemingly been the victim of the film’s title.In its few strong moments, Sucker Punch shows Snyder to be a director of commendable ambition with a distinct style. For the most part, it makes you wonder why Christopher Nolan handed him the keys to rebooting Superman.

Sucker Punch opens in the UK on the first of April

See also:

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