Sucker Punch

The most depressing thing about Sucker Punch isn’t the inane dialogue, the clumsy storytelling, the overgrown virgin’s take on feminist tropes, or even the tired CGI tricks that pass for action scenes. It’s that this is the small, personal film that 300 and Watchmen director Zack Snyder had to get out of his system before driving the nail in the coffin of the Superman franchise. Emily Browning plays Baby Doll, a victimized waif who vacillates between her real life in a sadistic mental asylum and multiple fantasy worlds that alternately cast her as a sex worker or a samurai. Predictably, Snyder makes the asylum scenes as loud and ludicrously overstylized as the scenes of Baby Doll battling Nazi zombies, and Browning doesn’t have the charisma to ground the film emotionally. Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone fair better in supporting roles as two of Baby Doll’s fellow crackpots/she-ninjas.