Without being too spoiler-y, Sucker Punch is the story of Baby Doll, a girl who loses her mother and sister and is committed to a mental asylum by her greedy caretaker, who wants her out of the way so he can steal her inheritance. Once there, the terrifying prospect of an impending lobotomy propels her into a deep state of shock, and she imagines the asylum is a brothel, and that her fellow patients are burlesque-dancing prostitutes she is helping escape the evil regime of an oppressive pimp/club owner (played awesomely by Oscar Isaac). Every time Baby Doll is ordered to dance, she goes off into dreamland, where she and her new friends (played by Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone and Jamie Chung) don fishnet body stockings and stilettos, literally suck on lollipops suggestively, and band together to fight off gargantuan samurai monsters, robot terrorists, zombie Nazis and fire-breathing dragons in a succession of battle scenes lifted straight out of a variety of fantasy and sci-fi films. Zack Snyder has been emphatic in interviews that these scenes are not pastiche, but whether he meant them to be or not, that is exactly what they are. In fact, pastiche is probably the nice word for what he's doing here.

Baby Doll's odyssey is one of an oppressed woman working within an exploitative, male-controlled system and trying to find a way to use the system itself against those oppressors to ultimately find a way out. She needs your key to a locked door? She'll steal it right from under your nose while giving you a lap dance. It's a theme we've seen before, and it's one that makes sense, and can work if done the right way. When it doesn't work, is if your cinematic gaze is inherently cemented in undermining these characters' power for the sake of titillation. There's one scene, where Jamie Chung is about to take a huge risk to secure their escape, and you're terrified and excited for this step in the character's development -- and then she steps in front of the camera to walk to her mission and there is literally an upskirt. A tight, close-up upskirt, at that.

The movie's full of that. Every time a female character is about to do something powerful, her, like, boob falls out or some shit. I mean, short of that, because it's PG-13, but I don't want anyone making the mistake that this is a competent feminist empowerment film (even if Zack Snyder is) because at every turn there is something objectifying to keep the 12-year-old boys from getting fed up with this "girl power" crap and walking out. Why, if Baby Doll is trying to break free of being a sex object, would she envision her and her friends dressed as porn stars in her fantasies? The answer is because Snyder thinks it looks cool, and it does, but that doesn't mean it makes sense. There is a strange phenomenon that's happened since Buffy, I guess, where people think putting a weapon in the hands of a girl in a short skirt automatically makes it some feminist work. It doesn't -- you have to do more than that, and Sucker Punch just doesn't feel like doing that work, because it would really cut into their half-naked chicks running around punching nerd-pandering clichés, which is truly all this movie is about. And that's fine. Just don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining. (Judge Judy would totally hate this movie, by the way.)

But I can't say it isn't visually beautiful. Like Watchmen, it takes place in a million different worlds, each more stunning than the next, and as a piece of visual art, Sucker Punch really is a triumph. He out Zack Snyder'd himself on the slow-mo -- literally every scene is slowed down at least a little bit, often times for no reason whatsoever -- but that's his thing, and it's hardly the biggest problem with the movie. If you can wait to rent it and watch it on mute, I bet it would be a glorious experience. Otherwise, prepare to be disappointed by a filmmaker in way over his head.

Get an in-depth look at the movie's gorgeous visuals with Sucker Punch: The Art of the Movie book.

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