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No. It is not. In fact, it's actually kind of great.
There are a number of reasons why critics tore this movie many a new asshole, some justified, some legitimate, and some just plain wrong. We're talking about arguments such as...
The Movie is Sexist
This seems to be the most common argument, and it's not hard to see why. This is a movie about five girls who struggle to break free from a prison of rape and torture, yet every ten minutes or so the main character is fighting robots in what looks like half of a schoolgirl uniform (no clues are left as to where the other half is). Sexy? Yes. Sexist? About on par with the national average. No one's going to say there's nothing objectifying about five young girls in tight outfits fighting dragons and dancing in a night club, but how did this raise so many eyebrows? Is it 1956? Calling this movie sexist is about as poignant as calling a blaxploitation movie racist. Sure, you have a point, but you also missed the point.
A movie like Sucker Punch would really have to go out of its way to be labeled 'sexist'. Showing women as the object of men's desires is not wholly deserving of this title- especially when most of the movie shows men to be weak-willed perverts who give in to their every desire. The girls use this weakness to their advantage: they steal, injure, and eventually earn their freedom from men by exploiting the very desires that kept them prisoner. A clear distinction is drawn between the strong and the weak, and the men never cross sides. In fact, when one of the girls buckles under fear, she's shown to be weaker than the others. The 'sexist' side of the movie is about embracing sexuality and taking control of it, because if you don't someone else will. It's not "Please rape me, for I am dressed like I'm about to shoot a porno." It's "Yeah, I'm dressed like I'm about to shoot a porno. Do you have a problem with that?"
Nope. None at all.
The difference between the scenes of forced stripteasing and the scenes of badass ass-kickery is surprisingly deep. In the nightclub, the girls' sex appeal is owned and controlled. They dance how and when they're told to. In the action scenes, the girls are in control. They're sexy because they want to be, not because someone forced it onto them. That is the greatest upset for the men in this movie. I've seen movies that are a lot more exploitative than Sucker Punch that don't try half as hard to be thematic about it.
Of course, a lot of people have said that they weren't expecting the movie to be exploitative at all. Just so we're on the same page, here is a poster for the movie:
Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc?
And another:
The Feminine Mystique?
And another:
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Hotpants?
You don't have to like this movie, but don't say a meatball hero is bad because you were expecting a vegetarian lunch. You can give a country music concert 2/10 stars because you don't like country music. Hell, you're entitled to that. But don't give it 0/10 because you didn't see the big sign that said "Country Music Festival". It's right there, man.
So yes, the movie is unabashedly exploitative. Maybe that's not your thing, but remember, you were warned.
And for a movie so full of sexploitation and badass Nazi zombie fights, it managed like hell to to come out from the shallow end of the lake. Which brings us to the next argument...
The Movie is Shallow and Disjointed
This is another criticism leveled in heaping volume by people who may or may not have been watching the entire movie. The badass action was meant to be entertaining, a post-modern mash-up of genres. You can't help but be delighted by the constant homages and transparent derivation. But to call this movie derivative is like calling 2001: A Space Odyssey 'slow' or The Maltese Falcon 'dark'. The response you'll get is, "Yeah, what's your point?"
She has a lollipop.
Sucker Punch is whimsically aware of its own lack of originality, and in a strange, paradoxical way, that's what makes it original. A lot of movies sidestep their own influences in an attempt to disguise themselves as fresh and original, and others rework the source material only enough to tell a new story. Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of remaking obscure movies and splicing the scenes together until they form a new narrative. People respect him because he does so unabashedly. He is one of the finest filmmakers of all time, and his knack is remolding the material of the finest filmmakers who came before him. That's what he does.
Zack Snyder tried to do the same, but instead of softening the edges and hiding the seams, he lashes out with references that are so clear and unmasked that they're downright vulgar. If you were expecting something fresh and original, you were misled somehow. Maybe this movie wasn't for you. Or maybe it was but you thought it was going to be something else. Don't underestimate the influence of expectation. You can like or hate a movie based entirely on what you thought it was going to be, regardless of whether or not it would have stricken your fancy otherwise.
Like this, for instance.
As moviegoers, we prepare ourselves for a specific type of experience. Mentally, when the expectation is met, we are rewarded. When the expectation is not met, we have to adjust. Realigning your expectations for a movie is a lot like hiring someone to rearrange the furniture in your living room. You don't have to do any work- hell, you don't even have to think about it- but it's annoying as hell when you're trying to watch the playoffs. You can't comfortably watch the game until all the furniture is where it needs to be, but you also can't control how long it takes or where the furniture goes. It's all done for you.
No one's saying that you don't have legitimate reasons for hating this movie, and hell, you could be right. Maybe it sucks ass. But if you found yourself unprepared for something that was a bit more lowbrow than you expected, at least consider it from a different perspective. Of course, you could have been expecting simple entertainment, which is why you may have argued that...
The Plot Doesn't Make Any Sense
Again, a criticism that one can only consider when taking the movie at face value. If you were really thinking to yourself "how will they use this knife and lighter and map to execute their brilliant escape plan?", you were watching the wrong movie. This isn't The Great Escape. It's not The Shawshank Redemption. Those movies are about literal escapes where the details are the most crucial element. Sucker Punch is not a mystery, nor is it a prison break flick. No one ever said it was, and it's not clear why anyone would get that idea about it. The whole point of the map/knife/lighter thing was to choose a set of items that was deliberately arbitrary. The point was to draw the viewer's attention away from the details of the escape and onto the emotional struggle of the characters.
Thematically, the map/knife/lighter was a tangible representation of the girls' desire to escape. The point wasn't to choose objects that would actually help them escape, but to demonstrate how unimportant the items themselves were. 'Map' could have been 'dinner plate', 'knife' could have been 'motor oil', 'lighter' could have been 'oatmeal'. The items on the girls' list of escape tools were variables, each meant to put the abstract idea of 'escape' into something physical, something tangible, something they could believe in. The girls were not trapped because they lacked the tools to escape. They were trapped because they lacked the will to escape. They lacked the belief that they deserved to escape. The only real obstacle was in their own minds, and that's what the list was for. Sometimes slaves don't even understand the concept of freedom. It's overwhelming, a flight of fancy, big talk for the dreamers. Encapsulate the idea of freedom into something as simple as a Zippo lighter or a kitchen knife, and suddenly it becomes very real. There were knives and lighters around all the time just waiting to be grabbed, but the girls lacked the imagination- the foresight, even- to put them to use. That's what the list was about.
Also, branded merchandise.
The list wasn't meant to be taken at face value any more than the 'fantasy scenes' themselves. If you thought the fight scenes were literal representations of what was going on inside Babydoll's head, I can confidently say you watched the movie wrong. The movie has three settings: the asylum, the night club and the battle fantasies. If you watched the entire movie thinking that those settings were all part of some girl's desire to mentally escape from the torture she faced, then you really missed the point. Nothing ever went on inside any character's head. Sucker Punch is not Inception, nor is it Shutter Island. The transitions are non-diegetic. Sucker Punch is made of three movies that all tell the same story, albeit from different lenses. Three very different schools of cinematic convention are utilized to tell a narrative in alternating succession. It was more Rashomon than Inception. One story, three different ways to tell it, all of which used the most obvious conventions of their respective mediums. Not only is that not silly, it's downright brilliant, and I'm ashamed to see that almost no one picked up on it. And that of course brings us to the...
Conclusion
Sucker Punch is like watching a movie that suddenly becomes a comic book, then a video game, then an opera and then a movie again... and it works, if you can appreciate what it's doing. You don't read the Buffy comic books thinking "Hmm, so Buffy is imagining that her life is a comic book in order to escape the harsh realities of vampire-hunting." You recognize that a new storytelling device has been employed, and you roll with it. Cinema is the most varied of all artistic mediums. Sound, picture, story, acting, performance- there are so many different ways to combine them that we haven't come close to exhausting them all. Don't be put off by a movie that experiments with changing these styles and mashing up multiple genres to tell one story. It's kind of an awesome thing, and it deserves a lot more recognition than it received.
And at the very least, we saw five hot girls fighting robots and Nazi zombies. Is that really so bad? Call it porn if you want, but then I'll just ask you again: is that really so bad?
No. Not at all.
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