Geek's Guide to the Movies: Sucker Punch

Presenting the return of the Geek. It's been a while. I wish I could've made a comeback sounding like a changed person; I was imagining critiquing a movie so awe-inspiring I just had to write a review about it. Ironically, it's the other way around. Somebody needs to warn the masses about this film. Do not waste 200 bucks on it. In the end, the only person who gets Sucker Punched is you.

I admit, I excite easily. Books, food... and movies. Watching trailers is like foreplay to me. When I saw the trailer for Sucker Punch, it was so mind-blowingly anime-zing that I even alloted a brain cell to remember its showdate. I wasn't expecting an intellectual film, of course. It was obvious to me even then that the movie is akin to an adolescent phantasmagoria. But I wasn't expecting a plotless, spineless film that pretends at empowering girls while encapsulating them further into the stereotype. If I take my lenses off --- all of the lenses at that --- I did feel a certain thrill of imagining myself as a gun-toting, samurai-wielding Lara Croft type of super heroine. But someone should have told the producers that the scenarios they have placed "Babydoll" in are not the inner workings of a woman. Certainly not one that, as the movie took the effort to explain, grew up as a bourgoise bred Anglo Saxon.

Sucker Punch is eye-candy. To be more precise, it's pop rocks for the extremely hormonal. The kind that sizzles and twitches in your mouth. But after all the popping and cracking is done, you're just left with a monstrous sweetness nauseauting enough to lead you into diabetic coma. I wish I could comment on the technicalities of the plot. But as I have mentioned before, it doesn't have one that makes any kind of respectable sense. In a bubble gum, it's supposed to be about a girl who was committed by his stepfather into a mental institution (which is actually a front for a "Dancing" club / whorehouse). She finds it so miserable that in one of her trances, she was told by a hammy looking old man the only way to get out is to find 5 items: a map, fire, knife, key and 1 other mystery object. The movie revolves around the trances she gets everytime they plot to retrieve an item. And the really kooky part is, we don't really get to see her dance.

Oh, and they all die, or get lobotomized in the end, save for one. Which one... is supposedly where you get sucker punched. Don't say I didn't warn you.