MOVIE REVIEWS: SUCKER PUNCH

Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is being punched right and left by critics, with many of them suggesting that the real suckers will be those by tickets to see it. Of the leading film critics, only Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times has anything positive to say about it, writing, “I’d suggest the film is a wonderfully wild provocation — an imperfect, overlong, intemperate and utterly absorbing romp through the id that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.” The other leading critics would seemingly have been all too happy to have missed it. Riffing on the film’s slogan, “Close your eyes, Open your mind. You will be unprepared,” Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune comments: “You will be unprepared for a film packing this much confusing crud into a little less than two hours of solitary confinement, which feels more like dog hours, i.e., 14.” Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls the film “soul-deadening” and remarks that this is the sort of film that “happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.” And Stephen Rea sums up in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Sucker Punch … is hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.”