D/Story: Zack Snyder. S: Zack Snyder, Steve Shibuya. P: Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder. Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Cugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Warner Home Video.

Watching Sucker Punch, un film de Zack Snyder, the fortysomething critic may find himself soon whisked, across the astral plane, to a mental refuge stacked high with marvels infinitely less dull: with tax returns, electricity bills, Bird’s Eye fish fingers. Bringing to mind Snyder’s fine debut, his remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (2004; still the only zombie-catastrophe film to convey an authentic, you-are-there sense of global apocalypse), the critic might follow up this reverie with a searching question: what went wrong? The director’s subsequent output has been distinctly underwhelming, dripping with glutinous CGI and gleaming with enough hi-tech artifice to make Michael Bay reach wistfully for his Ken Loach DVDs. His style is a frustrating blend of genuine visual flair and monstrously overblown self-importance; recalling his Alan Moore adaptation Watchmen (2009), say, it’s hard to view the hundreds of brow-furrowing man-hours spent animating a CG giant’s blue willy as time well-used. The downsides of Snyder’s directorial technique are more apparent than ever in Sucker Punch, a maddeningly over-stylised fantasy aimed at teens who believe computer games can be, like, way deep.

If there’s a single frame left untweaked by some form of digital tomfoolery, I’d be very much surprised. Fair enough, Snyder is out to create a paranoid atmosphere of heightened unreality for his mentally-disturbed protagoniste (Emily Browning, as “Baby Doll”); and there’s two ways of approaching this. One is through the subtle use of alienation effects – positioning your heroine at the extreme periphery of the ‘scope frame, perhaps, encouraging your cast to incorporate the occasional counter-intuitive nuance into their performances: non-showy tricks to introduce a feeling of “wrongness”, of a world sliding inexorably into psychosis. The other is to tilt the camera into warped comic-book angles, wildly saturate and desaturate the colour palette, and present every supporting character as a leering Hogarthian grotesque. Have a wild guess which way Snyder leans.

The plot, co-authored by Snyder, at least evinces a touch more ambition than your average trillion-dollar shoot-em-up: blonde jailbait (Browning), traumatised by the accidental killing of her sister while failing to protect her from their pervo dad, is committed to an all-girl asylum straight out of EC Comics and scheduled for a frontal lobotomy. But at the precise moment spike meets brain, we abruptly zoom out from “Baby Doll”’s face to discover it’s apparently an actress, rehearsing for some weird/kinky floor show, while the real Baby Doll watches from the sidelines. We have entered a fresh reality, where she is the new inmate of a women’s correctional facility whose warders run the place as a whorehouse for local bigwigs. Here Baby Doll discovers an unexpected gift for erotic dance, during which she enters a trancelike state and finds herself transported to a violent fantasy world where demons, zombies and dragons must be overcome in order to attain certain symbolic objectives, representing constituent elements of an escape plan she has hatched in the “real” world with her fellow captives.

Got that? The storyline is really an excuse for episodic bouts of CG-enhanced (i.e. 99% CG-fabricated) fantasy action setpieces, linked only by the most tenuous thematic connection: an X-Box vision of ancient Japan, with the mini-skirted heroine pitted against a trio of enormous, glowing-eyed samurai horrors, an alternative-reality WW1 battlefield fought over by steam-driven clockwork German stormtrooper zombies, and so on, the goal of each vignette spelled out by Baby Doll’s mystical mentor figure (Scott Glenn). It’s an uneasy blend of off-the-shelf “cool” imagery with an unpleasant and downright depressing understory, wherein child abuse, future-war battlegrounds and sword-and-sorcery are all grist to Snyder’s mindless mill, endlessly churning out its Nintendo-chic reality. And all to the accompaniment of abrasive rawk covers of 80s classics (“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” etc), the better to enhance Sucker Punch’s interminable slow-mo catwalk-strutting with big guns and dubious “barely legal” sexual imagery straight out of the Britney Spears handbook.

While Snyder and his mouse-clickers display, now and then, an eye for arresting visuals (a crumbling viaduct girded by flames in a post-apocalypse future Earth, for instance), none of it carries a shred of dramatic weight, and the heavily-foreshadowed downer ending is at once pretentious and deeply irritating. This reviewer’s loathing for only-a-dream wrap-ups borders on the pathological – is there any more dishonest, lazy or contemptible way to end a story? – so his frustration with Sucker Punch should come as no surprise. But what’s doubly annoying here is the film’s artless plagiarism, from the now-inevitable plundering of Wojciech Has’s The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and its densely-structured nested realities to Snyder’s more basic inspiration, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985): another tale of a hopeless fantasist given to quasi-surrealist dream duels with monstrous samurai, finally reduced to vegetable state by a pitiless authoritarian apparatus. Well, I’ve probably said enough. Sucker Punch wasn’t made for the likes of me, thank god; its target audience, whoever that pitiable bunch may be, is welcome to it.