Entertainment

Cheap in every shot

A soul-deadening mash-up of “Kill Bill,” “Showgirls” and dozens of other better flicks that’s not the least bit exciting or sexy, Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” is what happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.

A briefly seen Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” performs a lobotomy on a young woman named Babydoll (Emily Browning), but by the end of two hours of humorless, masturbatory non sequiturs from the director of “300” and “Watchmen,” I was beginning to feel like an ice pick had been shoved into my eye socket.

Certainly, I was feeling zero emotional engagement with the travails of Babydoll, an orphan who’s stashed in a mental institution by her stepfather to await Hamm’s ministrations after being framed for her sister’s murder.

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The manual typewriters and reel-to-reel recorders seem to place the story in the early ’60s at the latest, but once the ice pick is inserted, Babydoll is free to imagine herself and the institution’s female inmates wearing outfits from the 1998 Victoria’s Secret catalog while performing to ’80s techno-rock in a brothel.

“If you do not dance, you have no purpose,” says a psychiatrist-cum-madam played by Carla Gugino with a heavy Polish-Hungarian accent.

In perhaps the movie’s most perverse touch — or maybe an attempt by Warner Bros to use a PG-13 rating to grab as much business as it can before word-of-mouth gets out — we never see a single step of Babydoll’s allegedly sizzling dances, much less her and the other inmates’ erotic interactions with clients.

Instead, when Babydoll goes into her dance, she closes her eyes and we get a series of increasingly tiresome video game/music video sequences placing Babydoll and her joyless comrades — imaginatively named Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung) — in ancient China, the battlefields of World War I, medieval Europe and outer space.

Urged on by Scott Glenn — doing his best David Carradine zen impression while piloting a World War II bomber — they battle fire-breathing dragons, zombie soldiers and orcs while zeppelins and trains explode in the background.

Mostly, these are exotic backdrops for endless close-ups of the inexpressive Browning’s milky white thighs and bottom. Instead of titillating, this attention to the female form is merely boring, since Snyder (who is no Quentin Tarantino in the dialogue department) truly lacks the courage of his bad taste, not to mention an R rating.

Meanwhile, back in the other layer of fantasy, Babydoll and her comrades are plotting to escape from their captor (Oscar Isaac), but the narrative logic of these scenes is even skimpier than the actresses’ costumes. Certainly there’s no sense of peril whatsoever, even as Snyder frantically loads on homages to everyone from Orson Welles to Sam Fuller to Peter Jackson.

As far as I can tell, the title of “Sucker Punch” refers to anyone who ponies up $12.50 ($19 for IMAX) to see the year’s worst movie so far.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com