Sucker Punch

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. (26/03/2011)

A teenage One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in robotic Ninja underpants. A stupid shooter with a bunch of affected chicks in suspenders, acting as if they are in a cheap American porno, framed by a kind of pseudo-spiritual chatter about the power of man. What really disappoints me is the fact that Zack's visual montages are bombastic, but they completely miss the point – I don't know if it's their non-originality or that they are terrible self-serving, but Sucker Punch seems to me to be a wasteful mess that obscures the complete absence of soul with excess effects. It just confirms that Snyder is an excellent short film maker (although Sucker Punch lags behind the rest of his work in this regard) and that he leads the actors very benevolently – as long as he has solid material in front of the camera, it disappears, but once those revived teenage fantasies ring out, the result is disastrous. One advantage of this nonsense is that Watchmen seems like an even bigger miracle to me. But that's it (I curse myself now that I gave 300 such a low score...). P.S. The unreliable narrator has never been as unreliable as in this film (which takes away all his credit and effect). (23/03/2011)

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”. (02/04/2011)

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. (30/05/2011)

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. (19/06/2011)