Rated PG-13

Until recently, director Zack Snyder worked firmly in the confines of existing ideas—stylish adaptations and remakes of old material. “Sucker Punch,” which Snyder directed and co-wrote with Steve Shibuya, is technically his first original film. But calling “Sucker Punch” original is a gross overstatement, a wistful fantasy, or an outright lie. 

The film is two parts “Kill Bill” and one part “Moulin Rouge,” with dashes of the last five years worth of video games and anime. It might be the start of a new genre: the nerd-by-numbers flick, in which a dozen or so things geeks dig are tossed up onscreen Mad Libs-style and accompanied by a thumping soundtrack. 

“Sucker Punch” features gun- and sword-toting doe-eyed young women fighting giant stone samurais, Nazi steampunk zombies, orcs, dragons, and evil robots. For the next installment of “nerd-by-numbers,” we can probably count on ninja pirates, robot monkeys, a sharktopus, and lizard aliens. 

That wouldn’t be such a problem if “Sucker Punch” was a graphic novel, music video or maybe a game, but it’s a 90-minute movie. Once our heroines kill their enemies and obtain magic items, there’s still 60 minutes or so to fill. 

“Sucker Punch” ends up dumping some exciting-if-predictable action sequences on top of a ludicrous framing story that itself rests upon a whole other story that might be compelling had Snyder and Shibuya bothered to come up with some interesting characters. It ends up a bland appeal to geekery cobbled together by a director well-versed enough in nerd culture to pander to his audience but not respect them. Basically, it’s a goddamn mess that’s charmingly bad in its best moments and laughably overwrought in its worst.

“Sucker Punch” wastes no time diving into maudlin territory. The film kicks off with Baby Doll (Emily Browning) trying to protect her sister from their sleazy, abusive stepfather. There’s an accident and Baby Doll is carted off to a huge gothic mental hospital in New England. Her stepfather bribes an orderly named Blue (Oscar Isaac) to arrange a frontal lobotomy for the girl. The operation is scheduled to occur in five days, and Baby Doll spends her time dreaming up an elaborate fantasy world so that she can escape her confines.

Except, for some reason, her fantasy world just turns out to be a different kind of awful situation. In Baby Doll’s mind, the mental hospital becomes a Moulin Rouge-esque bordello and the other young girls there are “dancers,” which is the PG-13 way of saying “prostitutes.” Baby Doll and her quartet of companions (led by Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, both of whom seem to posses more acting talent than the material requires of them) set up a plan to escape Blue’s clutches. 

That plan involves Baby Doll retreating into a third fantasy world where she and her friends are gun-toting, ass-kicking warriors. A wise man (a very bored Scott Glenn doing his best David Carradine impression) shows up to act as the film’s rulebook and fortune cookie. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” he says, just before revealing the Nazi steampunk zombies’ fatal weakness. It’s a funny shtick the first time, but after four rounds of aphorisms and rules, it gets tedious. He tells the girls they have to fight various monsters and retrieve special items (a map, a key, a knife, and fire) so they can escape. 

Will escape from the bordello mean escape from the asylum? Who knows. Video games, at least, have rules, mechanics, and consistency; the film script is arbitrary and non-committal. Sometimes things in one fantasy world affect people or events in the real world and sometimes they don’t. As “Sucker Punch” lurches through its third act, Snyder attempts to up the stakes. The violence moves from the video game fantasies into the bordello and it looks like there might be some serious consequences. But since there’s no grounding in “Sucker Punch,” no real characters, no real emotion, or even a consistent location, there’s no point.

It’s not all bad. Blue, the slimy orderly/maniacal pimp, turns out to be the only character who’s not a video game avatar. Even though he’s the villain, he’s the only one worth taking an interest in, and Isaac gives the role as much substance as he can. He and Carla Gugino, playing a psychiatrist/dance instructor, seem like the only real flesh-and-blood people in “Sucker Punch.” They outshine Browning, Cornish, and the rest of the heroic quintet, who are nothing but blank slates dressed in schoolgirl outfits, tactical lingerie, and assorted pieces of fetish wear. 

Snyder proved in his adaptations of “Watchmen” and “300” and his remake of “Dawn of the Dead” that he can get by on visual flair alone. He makes a serious effort to do so again in “Sucker Punch,” and, taken by themselves, these monster-combat sequences are fun and exciting. But, when strung together with some gauzy context and half-sketched characters, the scenes—the creaky foundation upon which “Sucker Punch” is built—end up being both too much and not enough. It’s all sucker and no punch.