Sucker Punch

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”. (2011-04-01)

An incredibly crazy film, full of parodies, references, and captivating visuals. It’s a film made only for film enthusiasts and lovers of “fantasy” action. For bores and rational scientists, it will be a completely wasted hour and a half, followed by a feeling of WTF. Zack Snyder does whatever he wants and in his own way, it's also charming. (2011-07-09)

I love Zack Snyder in Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead, but I don’t like him in the silly 300. Sucker Punch is much worse than 300, thanks God that I didn’t go to the cinema for it. This is just pointless teenage fantasy that pretends to have a meaning. I’m not able to argue why I think it only pretends so, because this time I couldn’t be bothered to look for it while watching it, and I just don’t want to think about this film any further. Even the action is not that exciting. A fail of biblical proportions. (2011-06-18)

A film of two extremes. At one point it's a perfectly flaring, greatly entertaining, action-packed and almost ingenious ride full of energy and spectacular shots, whilst at other points it's a dragging, boring and stupid show of meaningless dialogues. The sequences where the viewer has fun or is bored alternate regularly. Whenever someone started talking, I tried to look at the ground and not listen. Terrible. On the other hand, when the shooting started, I couldn't look away from the screen. Fantastic perfect worlds. The film was worth seeing just for the German soldier zombies from the First World War powered by a steam engine with a watch. Great. But all of this gloss is wrapped in a dull story set in a nuthouse, which is completely useless and uninteresting. Sucker Punch is like a really beautiful painting set in a really ugly frame. Overall, it’s average. (2011-03-26)

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. (2011-03-24)