Now I like pornography as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. Definitely more than the next guy. Who is this “next guy” and why are we fighting about how much we like pornography? Anyway, porn is great. Porn and violence? Now that there’s The American Dream.

Yet despite the “visionary” Zack Snyder’s every attempt to give me a murder-boner with said elements, Sucker Punch, a movie he both poorly wrote and poorly directed, stimulated only my urge to gouge my eyes out. Never have I seen so many scantily-clad women, so many submachine guns, so many samurai fights, and so many robot explosions and still been bored to the point of desired self-mutilation. Thankfully, there were no spoons in the movie theater.

“Sucker Punch” opens with its eerily round-headed protagonist, Baby Doll, set against a gritty computer-generated backdrop that can be described only as Snyder-esque. Close-ups of her blank stare and subtly parted lips make one question whether Baby is distraught or just a dumbass, but soon the source of her grief arises (without disproving her idiocy): her mother has died, leaving Baby and her sister at the mercy of their villainous stepfather. He doesn’t waste any time trying to rape the two, so Baby whips out a gun she found and tries to blow the scumbag away. But being a store-bought mannequin, Baby has terrible aim, missing her stepfather from about five feet away and killing her sister by mistake.

At this point the stepfather somehow circumvents local authorities and throws Baby into a crooked insane asylum wherein a similarly crooked orderly forges some papers that will have the young woman lobotomized in five days. Baby now has less than a week to escape or else she’ll become, er, more catatonic? Conflict.

This is where the movie derails into senseless convolution, as Baby, after putting up absolutely no fight whatsoever on the way to the nuthouse, plans a devil-may-care asylumbreak with some of her sexy whack job peers.

Now a movie about a group of psychotic twentysomethings trying to escape a corrupt ’50s-era asylum actually sounds kind of cool, but Snyder takes a pass and instead writes in a conceit that allows him to bust out guns, swords, Nazis, dragons, androids, and his load. The idea is that Baby’s escape plays out through her inner fantasies; so one layer down Baby is a new dancer at a brothel whose virginity is going to be sold to “The High Roller” in five days time. Here she must collect a handful of items that will allow her to escape the brothel. But again, this version of Baby goes into fantasy, so for every item that Baby needs she envisions herself as a sword-wielding, gun-toting superhuman who must steal the items in question from the aforementioned dragons, robots, Nazis, etc. It’s unnecessarily winding, but it lets Snyder put his heroines into skimpy black outfits and cool manga poses. Girl power!

As a consequence, only about 20 of the 120 minutes could be considered plot-related or plot-progressing. I haven’t done the actual math, but that’s a pretty sound estimate. The rest is Baby and co. running around and killing things, which is well and good for the sadist in you that yearns for some vicarious blood-letting, but even your inner demons would conk out after two hours of repetitive fight sequences, hackneyed action tropes, and some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. Contrary to its quasi-lofty psychological premise, Sucker Punch is not for the thinking man. It’s not even for the thinking boy. The ten-year-old kid sitting in front of us was bored out of his mind and there were slutty broads as far as his spectacled eyes could see!

It’s easy to say, “It’s an action movie; you’re being too critical,” but the reality is that “Sucker Punch” doesn’t even get the fights right. With no plot and a lack of quality action we’re left only with a set of nearly naked, semi-attractive ladies; and why on Earth would you pay money to see that when you have the Internet and its vast reservoir of pornography?

*SPOILERS*

The real bitch of it all is that towards the end of the wholly imagined bloodbath, there’s a Shyamalanian twist where we find out that the story isn’t even Baby’s; it’s about one of her buxom cohorts. So the two hours we spent reluctantly attached to our tragic protagonist and her struggle to not have a metal spike rammed into her frontal lobe are tossed out the window. Baby gets the lobotomy and the escaped mental patient whose name I can’t remember boards a bus for Who Knows Where, USA, aided by a kindly old, cop-deceiving bus driver. And we’re supposed to feel good about this. . . .

Let it be known that my expectations were already pretty low going into the movie; in fact, the only reason I saw “Sucker Punch” was because I went to “Under the Sea 3D” at the Minnesota Zoo’s IMAX and was given a reduced ticket charge on the following feature and had nothing better to do with my Saturday afternoon. Although in hindsight that isn’t true; I could have read a book or composed a sonnet or stared directly into the sun for two hours–all would have been better than watching Zack Snyder take a dump on celluloid. Again.

Or maybe I’ve missed the point entirely. Maybe Snyder is actually a genius, and his goal all along was to give us a film that perfectly simulates what it’s like to be lobotomized. You’ve succeeded, maestro. Bravo!