MOVIE REVIEW: Is 'Sucker Punch' a male fantasy?

An ambitious, epic, operatic action delirium, the dark and intensely violent “Sucker Punch” is “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on acid. The film is a glorious disaster, a mind-bogglingly messy, perversely gorgeous piece of hyperstylized filmmaking that chills the blood one moment and thrills it the next.

 Emily Browning plays a young girl (we’ll call her Babydoll) who accidentally kills her younger sister while trying to defend them both from a rapist. Deposited in a Gothic insane asylum, Babydoll is sentenced to lobotomization. Her only escape from the hell she now calls home is her fertile imagination.

In this unfettered dream world, she bands together with other captive girls — Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung) — to plot an escape from their tormentors: Warden Blue (Oscar Isaac) and psychiatrist Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino). To make it to freedom, the girls will have to engage in a series of battles, each more terrifying and fantastical than the last, and decide just what they are willing to sacrifice to stay alive.

 This is the first film in director Zack Snyder’s (“300,” “Watchmen” “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”) career not based on some sort of pre-existing material — though chances are it will feel like it. Recycling elements of everything from “The Matrix” to “The Lord of the Rings,” Snyder has created a genreless hybrid that will almost certainly leave some viewers cold and confused.

While its dream within a dream concept is familiar to anyone who’s seen “Inception,” “Sucker Punch” flits back and forth within a muddled and chaotic stream of consciousness. Snyder holds absolutely nothing back. It is as if he thinks this will be his last film and as such throws the entire kitchen sink of geek-culture at the screen — giant samurai, jet packs, steampunk robots and kewpie dolls in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. “Sucker Punch” will either be the ultimate fanboy fantasy, or it will reach critical geek mass so quickly that it will collapse under the weight of its own fevered, pretentious imagination.

There is no blurring of the line between reality and fantasy here. The line is as clear and as stark as the proverbial demarcation between night and day. Structurally, the film resembles “The Wizard of Oz”—complete with some of the same visual cues. As stylized as the real world is, it is nothing compared to the hallucinogenic make-believe one. If viewers find the fantasy sequences ludicrous and over-the-top, that is merely a failure of imagination on their part—nothing should be too far fetched for our imaginations.

Unfortunately, the fantasy sequences, while easily the most exciting and dynamic of the film, are also the most messy and uncreatively monochromatic. They simply look too similar, with little to set them apart from one another. Snyder, who has oft been accused of being a style over substance filmmaker, has always embraced lavish computer generated effects. However, up until now, he always used them to support the story rather than distract from it. While in the past one could have argued that the substance was every bit as muscular (if not every bit as showy), that defense withers with this outing. The only philosophical survivor of this purge is pessimism so overwhelming it leads to something uncomfortably akin to fatigue.

 On some level, what’s not to like about teenage girls dressed as Fredericks of Hollywood models, laying waste to hordes of WWI Kaiser zombies, terminator robots and fire-breathing dragons with heavy assault weaponry? The answer — admittedly from a critic comprised of both an X and a Y chromosome — absolutely nothing.

If “300” was arguably the most masculine film ever made, “Sucker Punch” may be its female alter ego. However, I am having a difficult time deciding whether the film exalts in spectacular female empowerment or is little more than fetishistic, masturbatory, quasi-child pornography.

 Other than a kindly father figure (played by Scott Glenn), every single man in the film is a reprehensible villain. But Snyder’s protagonists are far from helpless women. Or are they?

Does the film elevate female empowerment only to subvert it by making their achievements little more than one character’s hallucinatory fantasy? So long as reality reveals the women as helpless and utterly physically and mentally dominated, does not “Sucker Punch” actually represent yet another in a gargantuan line of films grinding down the so-called fairer sex and reinforcing a repugnant tangent of the some twisted male fantasies?

"SUCKER PUNCH"

GRADE: C

Stars: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Oscar Isaac, Carla Gugino, Scott Glenn

Director: Zack Snyder

Rated:  PG-13 (for thematic material involving sexuality, violence and combat sequences, and for language)

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes