One thing’s for sure, Snyder must have been a hell of a Dungeon Master back in the day; the problem is that his cinematic storytelling has the same lack of narrative cohesion and emotional depth. There’s no denying that Snyder, like Michael Bay, is a master of entire movies made from nothing but superbly rendered trailer shots, one whose tenuous command of such basics as character development and narrative flow is proportionally inverse. Judged purely on its visual aesthetics, SUCKER PUNCH is a mess even on that level. It clearly wants to be a trend setter, but come across like last week's overcooked leftovers. Like a second-rate martial arts yarn or musical extravaganza, the whole enterprise is built around Babydoll’s hyperkinetic fantasies – all of which have the free-flowing logic and emotional continuity of a particularly vivid fever dream – with all those aforementioned fetishes mashed haphazardly together and structured as various video game-like “missions”.

To his credit, Snyder does manage to outdo his “unbroken" single speed ramping shot from 300 during a fight with some I, ROBOT-looking mecha on a train, but that’s one of the film's sole visual standouts. He’s clearly aiming for a can-you-top-that approach, but all that busy, busy sturm un Drang cancels itself out in the end.

Story wise, it may be unfair to compare SUCKER to, say, 15-year old Christopher Paloni’s Inheritance Cycle, but it’s an apt one – they’re both conceived and pitched at the same sophistication and reference levels -- plus, they both have dragons in them. The story (thin as you could call it) is aptly summarized in the above synopsis; to see how it’s actually executed is a whole different matter; the most egregious blunder being the manner in which the film transitions between its internal “reality” and “fantasy.”

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The set up: Babydoll has been incarcerated in a home for the insane (the type that can only exist in movies like these), after accidentally killing her younger sister in the process of defending her from their horny stepfather in a rather tasteless music video sequence (In comparison, “Janie’s Got A Gun” had more emotional integrity). Conceding that this is a fable, after all, and not a documentary, the asylum is a curious place, because instead of a tyrannical Nurse Ratched, there’s a pimp named Blue Jones (Isaacs), who makes the girls perform in burlesque numbers before various unsavory rich asshole types, and a dance teacher (Gugino) who coaches the girls how to dance, and “survive” Blue as an adjunct lesson.