Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, and Oscar Isaac also star.

During her dances, she fantasizes about adventures that mirror the escape efforts, such as infiltrating a bunker protected by World War I German soldiers to gain a map (as Sweet Pea copies a map of the building in Blue's office), storming an Orc-infested castle to retrieve fire crystals (as Amber steals a lighter from the mayor), and fighting robots on a train to disarm a bomb (as Sweet Pea steals a kitchen knife from the Cook).

Babydoll stabs him with the kitchen knife and steals his master key, then starts a fire to distract the orderlies as they seek an escape.

[27][28][29] Snyder had also offered roles to Abbie Cornish, Evan Rachel Wood, Emma Stone, and Vanessa Hudgens.

[33] Wood dropped out of the project due to scheduling conflicts with her recurring role in HBO's True Blood and her stage production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

[35] Chung was signed up to play "Amber"; Emma Stone had been offered the part but declined due schedule conflict with her film Easy A.

Snyder expressed his interest in the film's content: On the other hand, though it's fetishistic and personal, I like to think that my fetishes aren't that obscure.

[58] Sucker Punch operates on three levels – a reality, then a sub-reality where the psych ward world shifts into a strange high-roller's brothel.

The final level is made up of a dream world where more action sequences that are removed from time and space take place.

Then he yanks it all back and stabs us through the eyeball.Snyder has stated one interpretation of the film is that it is a critique of geek culture's sexism and objectification of women.

[70] Due to time constraints, Snyder was forced to cut most of the dance sequences for the theatrical release of the film, but there is one during the credits.

The official trailers contain samples from the songs "Prologue" by Immediate Music, "Crablouse" by Lords of Acid, "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin, "Tomorrow Never Knows" by The Beatles, "And Your World Will Burn" by Cliff Lin, "Panic Switch" by the Silversun Pickups, and "Illusion of Love" (Fred Falke remix) by Uffie.

Sucker Punch participated in the Comic-Con 2010 and showed the first footage of the film, featuring the songs "Prologue" by Immediate Music and "The Crablouse" by Lords of Acid.

The second official trailer was released on November 3 and was attached to Due Date, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, and Black Swan.

They don't think a girl should ever be in control of her own sexuality because they're from the Stone Age... they got Zack to edit the scene and make it look less like she's into it.

The site's critics consensus reads: "It's technically impressive and loaded with eye-catching images, but without characters or a plot to support them, all of Sucker Punch's visual thrills are for naught.

"[86] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 33 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

Richard Roeper gave the film a D, saying that it "proves a movie can be loud, action-packed and filled with beautiful young women – and still bore you to tears.

"[89] The Orlando Sentinel gave the movie one out of four stars calling it "an unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold".

Club's Nathan Rabin wrote, "with its quests to retrieve magical totems, clearly demarcated levels, and non-stop action, Snyder's clattering concoction sometimes feels less like a movie than an extended, elaborate trailer for its redundant videogame adaptation.

"[91] Reviewing it for The Sydney Morning Herald, Giles Hardie called the film "incredibly ambitious", and explained that while "traditional depths of character development and motivation are sidelined, [...] this is intentional, allowing the audience to immerse in the layers of dreams and later piece together what actually happened".

Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York named Sucker Punch the tenth-best title of 2011: "This excessive digi-satire spits in the face of fanboys-'n'-their-franchises.

"[98] In a 2018 article for Oscilloscope Laboratories, Sheila O'Malley wrote favorably of Sucker Punch and described its similarities with the Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933.

Though they are given vicious snarls, swords and guns, the leading ladies of Snyder's latest are nothing more than cinematic figures of enslavement given only the most minimal fight.

"[101] Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune stated that "Zack Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

"[102] St. Petersburg Times critic Steve Persall found that the most offensive fact about the film was that it "suggests that all this objectification of women makes them stronger.

"[105] However, Betsy Sharkey of The Los Angeles Times suggested that the film neither objectifies nor empowers women, and is instead a "wonderfully wild provocation – an imperfect, overlong, intemperate and utterly absorbing romp through the id that I wouldn't have missed for the world.

"[106] In a retrospective article about the critical reception of Sucker Punch, James MacDowell questioned the alleged misogyny of the film, arguing that it does not in fact aim to offer female empowerment, but is instead "a deeply pessimistic analysis of female oppression", because it makes clear that, "just as men organize the dances, so do they control the terms of the fight scenes; in neither do the women have true agency, only an illusion of it.

"[109] Scott Mendelsohn of The Huffington Post called the film a "bitterly sad and angrily feminist mini-epic", and said that while it presents scenes of "matter-of-fact lechery from men towards women that is an accepted norm in our society, both then and now", it "earns kudos for daring to actually be about something relevant and interesting.

"[110] Patrick Bromley of DVD Verdict posited that Sucker Punch uses the "prism of popular culture to say something about the roles that women find themselves forced into—and not just in the fantasies of geeks and fanboys".