Sucker Punch

The action scenes were all over the place to me, but I wasn't going to talk about that. It was more about how I absolutely loathed the way they alternated between a Hollywood-esque triumph over evil (or when Amber et al. were fighting) with scenes that were shockingly cruel, dirty, and "real". It didn't make me feel good, and considering that this was happening throughout the entire movie, I didn't have a lot of fun. But for the other sex, there are plenty of babes here, each different, so maybe you can even pick one to watch. Plus, the babes here carry guns too: every teenager's dream... and the second star is for the soundtrack. (05/30/2011)

Perfect action sequences in a story about girl power that is only held together by the main protagonists’ makeup. Snyder shouldn’t write screenplays. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I won’t put up with this type of video game anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I always used to want to see scenes like where the dragon is chasing the airplane with the medieval battle raging beneath them or where the Nazi cyborgs are fighting in the trenches against a gang of scantily dressed young ladies (and that machine gun really suits Abbie Cornish). But since then, my movie priorities have changed. (06/18/2011)

Sucker Punch is a combination of decadent musical and dumb video-game adaptation. It’s built on a storyline set in “reality”, from which it escapes to musical numbers (video-game levels). The storyline, however, does not work and is here only to hold all of the fantasy-action detours together. And these detours, in which the heroines destroy Nazis, ninjas, dragons and orcs from The Lord of the Rings and robots from I, Robot, do not work for more than the first ten minutes, because they are merely a visual exhibition without any innovation. You might find some similarities to Tarantino’s Kill Bill in the way this film’s script is constructed, but Tarantino is “a bit” better screenwriter than Snyder – his storyline was more solid and developed through the individual episodic detours. The detours that make up Sucker Punch are self-serving, meaningless and bring nothing to the story. It is a pulpy mishmash that must have looked like a disaster waiting to happen when it was still only on paper. (03/24/2011)

Snyder is fantastic with visuals and music (anyone who has seen the brilliant but sadly underrated Watchmen knows this), but for God's sake, never, ever let him write his own scripts! If I were to rate only the composition of shots, the imaginative details, the spectacular slow motion (which, I don't know how Snyder does it, I don't mind it in his case) and the the soundtrack (“Army of Me” by Bjork made me foolishly believe I would love the film), it would be worth a full score. But the decadent pop-cultural, cringeworthy, scripted ballast, which also pretends to convey some higher message, was impossible to digest even with a full brain shutdown. Snyder is a great craftsman, but he needs a permanent whip over him and a humility within himself, which, on the other hand, was not lacking in his almost reverential adaptation of Moore's “Watchmen”. (04/01/2011)

A very action-packed spectacle full of (almost) everything. The soundtrack was a bit too loud for my taste and it was composed of music that I am not very impressed with, but I have to admit that it was a perfect match for the images that Snyder conjured up. The relatively simple story is not worth criticizing, because with a more complicated plot Sucker Punch would probably not have been as impressive. The girls and women were very good, many scenes were not lacking in unexpectedly believable emotions, and I will probably watch the part inside the speeding train many times. Four and a half stars, and I'd love to see the director's cut. (10/20/2012)