Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is the mutant offspring of Girl, Interrupted; Moulin Rouge; Casshern  and countless Japanese Mangas. If that sounds a mess, broadly speaking it is. The story, such as it is, follows the heroine Babydoll (Emily Browning) as she is pit in an asylum by her abusive step-father and faces the prospect of a lobotomy in 5 days time unless she can work out a way of escape. She retreats into a fantasy world, where the asylum becomes a brothel where she dances for the clients to distract them, whilst her companions (Abby Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) go about pilfering the various things they need to make their escape. Except we don't see the dance, but rather enter into a deeper layer of Babydoll's fantasy where the girls are fighting giant samurai robots, clockwork steam-powered German zombies, dragon and yet more robots.

Director Zack Snyder's previous films (300, Watchmen) have suffered from a triumph of style over substance, but at least the style was impressive and there was some kind of coherent story to hang it. Here, there are impressive images but there are all thrown together so haphazardly in a blur of action that what you end up with is lots of things that might look good as still images getting lost in the blender with none of the steampunk, gothic, burlesque, martial arts, anime, fantasy, sci-fi or just plain weird elements having enough room to actually shine. As for the story, well, by the end you might well be scratching your head. In other filmd with multiple layers of reality (most recently and notably, Inception) the links between the layers are managed well, here -they feel clumsy to the extent that we're left wondering what happened to three characters in reality (is it actually reality) after events at one fantasy level. By the end, you might even be wondering whose head this is all happening in. Of the characters, only Browning, Cornish and Malone are allowed anything anywhere near depth or nuance.

That said, each individual set piece is well enough handled in terms of the action to be engaging and interesting, even exciting at times. The performances are on the whole not bad and there's a cheesy charm to Scott Glenn (channeling the late David Carradine) turning up and offering advice and corny aphorisms.

Overall - 5.5/10 Noisy and messy, but not without some good features and invention, but maybe needed a more disciplined hand in putting it all together.