Zack Snyder (Watchmen) reveals himself to be his own worst enemy in Sucker Punch, his first attempt at writing and directing wholly original material. A thuddingly juvenile stab at so-called “female empowerment” tropes, it’s a project of gargantuan excess that would have been laughable if it weren’t so oppressive and desperate in its soulless showmanship. The film’s suffocating procession of themed set-pieces is about as much fun as watching Snyder check off his geek fetishes (anime: check, dragons: check, steampunk: check, etc) – arbitrarily staged CGI-powered overkill courtesy of a technician with too many toys to play with and nothing to say. Sucker Punch simply gives us no reason to believe why Baby Doll (Emily Browning, suitably pouty, but little else) – a troubled 20-year-old girl in the 1960s who’s sent to the loony bin – would exactly imagine herself fighting giant demonic samurais or Nazi zombies. Is she a voracious connoisseur of pulpy comics we do not know about? It’s just one of many inconsistencies in Snyder’s shockingly witless and unpolished script, which commits the sin of failing to develop its ass-kicking, scantily clad babes into any characters we give a damn about. Depressing cinematic lobotomy representing Hollywood at its nadir.