Sucker Punch Review

Sucker Punch is a wild and wonderful epic action fantasy brimming with shoot-outs, special effects and a seriously sexy group of lead actresses in snug costumes fighting their way through a plethora of enemies. It's a stylish comic-book style romp that revels in energy and sexuality. Some will dismiss it as “style over content” and focus on the sexiness of the leads, but they won't be able to deny the visual drive of Sucker Punch. Director Zack Snyder is a master of comic-book style action movies driven by stunning special effects…read more [mirror.co.uk] This movie is career suicide. Zack Snyder is still one of the most visually arresting filmmakers out there, but no one in a million years is ever going to give him carte blanche again. The film is an embarrassment, a black eye on entertainment that will become the unwilling example of what happens when geeks are allowed to do whatever they want without supervision. It is a film I wish I had seen at home, if only so I could yell at the screen all the obscenities that sprung to mind as I endured minute after ridiculous minute. I've never walked out of a movie – but this one really tried my patience. I beat it, but I don't feel that I in any way won…read more [Ain't It Cool] Sucker Punch is a crazy movie, but it's my kind of crazy. I think Zack Snyder just thought of the craziest things he wanted to see in a movie, so he did it. That's what artists should do. Now it turns out to be some metaphorical fantasy and that's cool too. It makes the film beautiful in addition to being awesome. Baby Doll (Emily Browning) faces an evil stepfather in a haunting slo-mo, dialogue free opening. He commits her to the Lennox House institution after she fights him and accidentally kills her own sister. He's also paid the Lennox House orderly off to have Baby lobotomized so she can't tell her side of the story…read more [ScreenJunkies]

“Sucker Punch,” a barrage of green-screen effects and comic book portentousness from “300” and “Watchmen” director Zack Snyder, is hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year. A field day for schoolgirl fetishists and fanboys with a penchant for steampunk (but with Snyder's leaden dialogue, you've got to call it steamclunk), this staggering failure borrows from Baz Luhrmann's “Moulin Rouge,” Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's “The City of Lost Children,” Quentin Tarantino's “Kill Bill” and a variety of psych-ward melodramas from “The Snake Pit” to “The Uninvited.”..read more [nj.com]

Though “Sucker Punch” has the fresh feel of something new, the warrior princess leitmotif tracks back to Greek legend and has turned up in fiction and film ever since. The stories are sometimes cheeky in the way of Angelina Jolie's sharp-shooting siren in “Lara Croft.” Sometimes, the twisted tales go darker as did Quentin Tarantino's cut in “Kill Bill” Vols. 1 and 2, with a brutalized and sexualized Uma Thurman. Snyder goes darker still, opening “Sucker Punch” with a look through a rain-soaked window at why Babydoll's such a mess. Her mother's death has triggered a sinister free-fall that includes a narrow escape from her lecherous stepfather's evil intentions, the accidental shooting of her little sister and her immediate incarceration in a Vermont mental institution that prefers its crazies be virginal beauties. Technically the film is set in the '60s, but it feels more like the '40s when lobotomies were all the rage…read more [LA Times]

Certain to create a gaping divide between generational and aesthetic camps, Sucker Punch is a largely grim and unpleasant display of technical wizardry wrapped around a story that purports to be inspirational. Enshrouded in a fantastical and dark, heavy metal mindset and populated by characters that resemble standbys in a road company of Showgirls, Zack Snyder's latest CGI action spectacular is constructed to allow for any kind of flight of fancy he can dream up. But because they're figments of a girl's imagination, nothing is at stake, resulting in minimal suspense or rooting interest. Hot anticipation from fanboys and the strong female angle suggest big box office potential for this Warner Bros. release, at least at the outset, but these constituencies have proved increasingly fickle and unreliable of late…read more [Hollywood Reporter]

Emily Browning as Baby Doll in Sucker Punch

You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island; or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls; or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dancemaster role here) with a higher nightmare quotient; or an $82-million tribute to Jess Franco's sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the '70s; or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki “pinky violence” melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade; or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prison-like environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit. With the action scenes playing like production numbers in some high-concept musical, you'll be reminded of Julie Taymor's Beatles fantasia, Across the Universe. The visual palette suggests the creepy pastel paintings of Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams); the fantasy battles with monsters and samurais echo the muscular landscapes of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. The movie is like an arrested adolescent's Google search run amok…read more [Time]

I have to say that we are getting close to the summer movies and finally something good has come out. I will not say that this movie is the greatest i have ever seen because i will still say that the watchmen was the greatest movie zack has ever did. The performance was good just a confusing plot story seem to follow the inception/matrix formula of reality or fiction. so if you like those type of stories and you dont think you will get dizzy from this movie than check it out. i think you will like it. I give this movie a 4 star its good but not great. so dont go into this movie with a OH MY GOD THIS IS THE GREATEST MOVIE non sense because it like that at all. its more story than it is action they have the big battle scene at the end which made up for this long complex mystery…read more [MovieWeb]

Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish and Vanessa Hudgens in Sucker Punch

“Sucker Punch” is a flatly played flat-looking exercise in green screen filmmaking, “Sin City” without the sin. Emily Browning plays a young heiress committed to Lennox House by a hateful, nameless guardian who framed her for the murder of her sister. There, she takes the (striptease) dancing cure of a Polish psychotherapist (Carla Gugino) and joins four other young women in an escape that they plan to carry out in an alternate reality. Scott Glenn is the “Wise Man” who gives “Baby Doll,” as Browning's character is known, the marching orders for her quest. She must obtain five talismans to escape. She has five days to get out before a lobotomy is administered (by Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”). So she enlists Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Amber (Jamie Chung), her fellow dancer/hooker/inmates, to join her…read more [Orlando Sentinel]

Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens in Sucker Punch

The dialogue and plot doesn't help, as this plays out like your standard Roger Corman-style “women-in-prison” pic, minus the graphic sex and given a $100 million budget. This is a shame though, as there's some real talent in the cast. Emily Browning was too much of a blank slate for me to be impressed, while Chung and Hudgens are essentially bit players. However, I was really taken with Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone both of whom are good enough that you really wish the film was a little less ludicrous, and more invested in its characters. They play sisters, with Cornish being the tough older one. The fact that Cornish is a shade older than the other actresses helps give her a bit of authority, but Cornish really deserves a better vehicle for her talents than this. As for Malone, wow, she's really grown into a beautiful woman (reminding me a bit like a young Meg Ryan), and whatever warmth or humanity the film ever has is solely thanks to her and Cornish…read more [Joblo]

Now here's where it gets tricky. After the quick tour around the sketchy-looking mental facility, we suddenly come to the room the lobotomy is about to be carried out in by an almost out-of-place Jon Hamm playing the doctor. Just as he is about to begin, Baby's eyes open wide and all of a sudden we find ourselves in what appears to be an alternate reality of the hospital, where the dirty, glowering girls are now glammed up bordello slaves forced to dance and more for “high rollers” and other clientele. After getting a new tour, this time of a place that resembles an elegant theater rather than a mental hospital, Baby is brought to a dance studio room where the other girls and their Madam (who is really their therapist, in the “real” world) are gathered to practice their routines, and is made to dance for the first time. In order to deal with the pressure of having to “fight for her life”, as Dr. Gorski-the-Madam put it, she sinks into what is yet ANOTHER alternate reality where she meets the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) who cryptically instructs her on how to fight for her escape. Confused yet?…read more [HeyUGuys]

Emily Browning (Baby Doll) in Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch Movie Info

Running time: 110 minutes Rated: PG-13 rating Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn Director: Zack Snyder Genre: Action | Fantasy | Thriller Studio: Legendary Pictures, Cruel and Unusual Prods. Budget: $82 million Official Movie Web Site: http://suckerpunchmovie.warnerbros.com/ Opens: March 25, 2011. (Warner Bros.)

Sucker Punch Video Review

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVzBVkb-Bw[/youtube]