'Sucker Punch' fails to connect

"Sucker Punch" features lots of spectacle and skin -- too much of it, says reviewer Tom Charity. Emily Browning (center) stars. STORY HIGHLIGHTS"Sucker Punch" stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens Browning's character escapes into an alternative reality, a bordello/burlesque houseTom Charity calls it "a seedy, desaturated, overstimulated simulation of a real movie"RELATED TOPICSMoviesMovie ReviewsEntertainment (CNN) -- Zack Snyder evidently had an awesome idea for a video game. But for some reason, he decided to do it as a movie first.

I mean, it's playing in movie theatres, so I guess you would have to call it a movie, albeit a sorry excuse for one.

Snyder has accrued some status with younger fans through his boldly stylized retakes on George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," Frank Miller's "300" and Alan Moore's "Watchmen."

So far, the raw material has been distinctive enough to camouflage Snyder's increasingly threadbare bag of tricks: toggling between slow and fast motion, extreme close-ups and vertiginous long shots. He feeds back the kind of bastardized cinematic effects that comic books, pop videos and games took from film in the first place. It's a high-impact, low-return aesthetic that promotes a tawdry gloss above character and story.

Talking of which, "Sucker Punch" is Snyder's first stab at original material. And when I say "stab," I mean he prods at it anxiously with a long blade, as if he wants to make sure it's well and truly dead.

If Snyder has any call on the attention of a reasonably intelligent adult -- and on the evidence of this sleazy atrocity, that's a mighty big "if" -- it's as a pioneer of a post-narrative cinema, in which sensation and spectacle are paramount and situation is as fluid as a digital composite. Here he conjures giants, zeppelins, and dragons all in the blink of an eye. But are these things enough when they come out of thin air?

Clearly not, as "Sucker Punch" falls back repeatedly on the hoariest of melodramatic cliches.

And so we're treated to orphaned sisters abused and (in one case) murdered by an evil stepfather, who commits the surviving girl (Emily Browning) to an asylum and bribes the warden to arrange a lobotomy. All this within the first three minutes.

Browning

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