If there’s such a thing as film-based Karma, we’re really in for a treat in the coming months. I don’t know what kind of wonderful, magical, beautiful film the world could possibly create to re-pay the Karmic surplus I’ve just accumulated, but I won’t rest until I’m repaid in full for what I’ve endured.  Sucker Punch be thy name.  

I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s just start with the most glaring problems, okay?

Sucker Punch is the story of Baby Doll.

I’ll pause there to allow you time for you to roll your eyes, throw up in your mouth, or whatever it is you need to do. It’s natural. Let it all out. For the record, I can’t live with myself if I type the phrase “Baby Doll” any more, so I’m going to go ahead and substitute that name with Bob Dole. I hope you’re cool with that. It’s for the greater good. Now back to the plot.

So, Bob Dole accidentally kills her sister one night as she’s attempting to fend off the perverse advances of her wicked stepfather. In revenge, the stepfather commits her to a local insane asylum.

In the asylum, Bob Dole hatches a plan for escape that is largely carried out not only in a fantasy world, but also in a fantasy world that exists inside a second, superfluous fantasy world. Yep. That happened.  And I paid to see it.

You may be asking yourself what exactly runs through the mind of a young woman that’s been imprisoned in an asylum against her will. Sucker Punch is goodly enough to show us that said young woman spends most of her days envisioning elaborate battle-sequences in which she prances about in a schoolgirl outfit, sword-fighting in a manner that affords her mental camera only the most opportune shots of her own ass.

Ha! And I’ll bet you were thinking she would spend time trying to heal the emotional wounds inflicted upon her by an abusive stepfather – weren’t you, you simpletons! Well, you’re wrong. Most of the time, after a jarring brush with sexual abuse and sibling murder, you’ve just got to lay back and picture a nice, sexy sword fight set to contemporary music.

I can tell already that these fantasy worlds are going to be a problem for the purposes of this review. An explanation is due. First we have the real world – that’s the one where Bob Dole is in the asylum. Next, we have the first fantasy world, in which Bob Dole is being held at a burlesque house against her will to eventually be sold to a man known only as “the high-roller.” Finally, we have the second fantasy world, which consists of video sequences that would make Sut Jhally set himself on fire – think: kung-fu, schoolgirl outfits, and mechanized zombie-nazis.

In the first fantasy land (the Burlesque) Bob Dole doesn’t really have any super-powers, save one: she can dance in a manner so sexy, so titillating, that the men in the crowd become literally hypnotized while watching her. Literally. LIT. TER. A. LEE. I’m not misusing that word; I checked the definition and everything. This was actually written in a plot, and someone read it and said: “You’re on to something here, bro – I’m going to give you a vast sum of money for what you’ve done.”

To say that Bob Dole is a one-dimensional character is a gross understatement. If anything, she has more dimensions than your average character, and they’re all terrible. Some of them are offensive at such an intense frequency that only dogs can perceive how truly repugnant they are. She is a sad, misbegotten leviathan of male/nerd wish fulfillment writhing at the bottom of an ocean of her own melodrama.

This, friends, is not hyperbole – this is me exercising restraint about my feelings toward this movie.

In closing, I’ll say something that you wouldn’t normally hear me say: this film is trash. It has no worth. It tries to sell horrible notions about femininity and other subjects that it doesn’t care to comprehend. And it does so because, hey look, machine guns and swords and scantily clad girls!

Don’t be duped into enjoying this nonsense.