Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is a coquettish little delicate-darling packed off by an evil stepfather to an asylum for criminally insane women. Except that it’s actually a front for a brothel. The warden is its devilish task master, the resident therapist his unwilling accomplice and the inmates are sexual fetish archetypes hopelessly forced into the trade.

 

Baby Doll has a plan. She has five days to make friends, bust the racket and stage an escape before the visiting surgeon performs a scheduled lobotomy on her addled brain. 

 

How will she do it? Recall any prisoner sexploitation B-flick from the ‘80s. Remember how the premise always promised titillation and seduction as the only weapons available to women and torture and sexual humiliation as the weapons used against them? It’s still the same. Now imagine that every time those scenes came on, your mother changed the channel to Animax.

 

That’s Sucker Punch, dictionary-defined as an unexpected blow.

 

Unexpected is right. Whenever Baby Doll gets into situations that are above PG-13, she escapes into action-adventure fantasies with the same ease as Bollywood couples landing up in Switzerland for random song sequences. Before long, the film turns into a musical with green-screen violence instead of wanton dancing every fifteen minutes.

 

Each fantasy inhabits an abstract world digitally detailed with relish. Ordinary objects in extreme close-up fall in slow motion with dramatic conclusion. Bullets and swords slice through samurai titans, Nazi robots and dragons alike. And every raging exchange is scored by block-rocking retro anthems remixed.

 

But every time you think that this is director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) at his best – all style, the fantasy drops and the movie reverts to its B-grade roots. With ham acting, a weak script and a cliché-ridden plot, it’s actually Snyder at his worst; no substance. 

 

Sucker punched?