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A cacophonous disaster wrapped in movie-parts and teen flesh, Sucker Punch says what it does and does what it says - and that ain't good. This is blunt-force-trauma filmmaking, if the filmmaking descriptor can be applied at all. Mr. Ebert, this is your cue: video games, indeed, can't be art.

In Sucker Punch, a platinum-blonde waif called Baby Doll gets locked up in a mental institution and is scheduled for a lobotomy. For reasons no one can explain - because there are, of course, no reasons - she proceeds to invent an elaborate fantasy landscape which, if navigated successfully, will allow her to escape from prison. This torturous setup allows director Zack Snyder to stage a series of "levels" for Baby Doll and her team of fellow inmates to play their way through, each with a default piece of random PlayStation symbology as a goal: a map, a key, a flame, etc.

And as anyone who has seen any of his previous films would attest, if there is one thing Zack Snyder has very clearly been itching to do from the moment he picked up a handicam, it's shoot a bunch of action sequences that are unbound by any rhyme or reason other than the need to be the batshit-cooliest video game levels you've ever fuckin' seen, man. With subtlety thrown clean out with the bathwater, he turns each orgy of action into a veritable burlesque routine, as Baby Doll's baby-doll schoolgirl outfit flaps and flutters, flashing tantalizing glimpses of sweet teen ass and creamy white thighs even while our doughty hero is chopping, hacking, and kicking her way into pure post-feminist action icon status.

But wait. Explain it to me again: Baby Doll is in a mental institution, and in that mental institution, she is imagining that she is part of a dance troupe, and in that dance troupe, she is imagining that she is fighting giant megazords from beyond space, dressed in a kilt and halter top. And beating the level boss at the end of the gorgeously-visualized, punishingly uninvolving action sequence that is three levels deep in the delusions of an incarcerated girl puts that girl one step closer to freedom from the mental institution exactly how?

Wait again. Any movie action sequence I've ever seen, and even something as pointless and facile as a level in a video game, has rules... but if nearly everything that happens in Sucker Punch happens in Baby Doll's imagination, what then? The imagination, by definition, has no rules, and movies without rules, by definition, are not interesting. Or in other words, if anything can happen, why do I care why anything is happening?

Sucker Punch makes exactly this much no-sense-at-all, and is bound up meanwhile in piss-poor dialogue and performances that embarrass every actor who opens his or her mouth. For the first half of the picture, the action sequences and musical montages are welcome respites from all the humiliating attempts at conversation; but by around the middle of Baby Doll's efforts to win World War I with the aid of a kendo sword and a giant robot rabbit, I was pretty sick of the non-talking scenes, too. The video game levels become so formulaic - introduced with a cover song, extroed with a reprise of same - that any "wow, shit, look at that!" I might have felt when Baby Doll first suited up in her sexywear and took on a Japanese castle - admittedly, the movie's single genuine triumph - gave way to the red-faced shame of a post-fuck john.

The fault lies entirely with Mr. Zack Snyder, who built this mishmash from the ground up, a cinematic Frankenstein's monster, all repurposed carcass and entrails with no sense to do anything besides emit its turbulent wail. For all his painfully gleaming pride in the result, Snyder has done little more than construct yet another cruel death fantasy to sell to little girls in the guise of an empowerment kick, and for that he should be ashamed of himself. The masturbatory excess in every frame of Sucker Punch, the block-capitals ART DIRECTION that reeks neither of organic concept nor judicious aesthetic, but rather a pubescent boy's interest in boobies and vaginas and things that kill other things, would be little more than a pathetic window into a pathetic mind were it not so casually mean-spirited in its final calculation. Sucker Punch crushes down with a climax so hateful and oldschool-sexist that it colours every single thing that comes before, up to and including the phenomenal quantity of information I now have about Emily Browning's crotch, in the charcoal shades of outright predation, inviting yet another generation of teenage girls to believe that the only way out is through self-annihilation. Why don't you just hand them a razor blade while you're at it, Zack? This is a mean, ugly, stupid movie.