I’m left pondering the new Zack Snyder film “Sucker Punch.”

As I write this review, I admit that my mind is still not fully made up about whether I liked the film or not, so this review will serve little purpose to anyone wanting to know if it’s worthwhile.

In the film, a girl by the name of Baby Doll (Emily Browning, the little girl in the “Lemony Snicket” adaptation), is sent to a mental institution after accidentally shooting her little sister.

There, she meets her other inmates, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung).

The mental institution is actually a front for a burlesque house. Or maybe the burlesque house is a front for the mental institution.

Or, maybe the burlesque house was all just imagined in Baby Doll’s head.

I’m not quite sure.

Well, wherever they are, it’s run by a man named Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac).

Baby Doll races against the clock and blurs the line between reality and fiction to collect five items – a map, a key, fire, a knife and a mysterious fifth object – which will help her and her inmates escape.

If she doesn’t escape in time, she will be lobotomized by a man called the High Roller (Jon Hamm).

Or, if she doesn’t escape, the High Roller will take her virginity.

Or, maybe they are planning to lobotomize her then take her virginity. Maybe vice versa. Again, I’m not quite sure.

Director Zack Snyder, the man behind “300,” “Watchmen,” and the upcoming Superman film doesn’t realize when too much is too much. Sometimes that works, but here, it’s a mixed bag.

This movie wants to be a mindless action movie.

Whenever Baby Doll dances and the other girls try to acquire the aforementioned five items, we escape into Baby Doll’s mind: the scenes involving the dragons, robots and zombie soldiers so heavily publicized in the advertisements.

Some of those sequences are pretty exciting; some, not all.

Watching the girls slicing through the robots on the speeding monorail was awesome and the best scene in the movie, and the dragon in an aerial battle with the girl’s helicopter is fun.

But the problem is most of the action scenes inside the fantasy world are not exciting or fun to look at.

I had the same reaction to this film as I did with Snyder‘s “300,” where action was happening on the screen, but I wasn’t particularly engaged or excited by it.

Some of the dramatic scenes in what I believe is the real world were far more compelling and exciting than watching sexy chicks shoot zombies with machine guns.

Part of the problem is the fantasy world is so dank looking and ugly.

I don’t expect the mind of a troubled teenage girl to look like “Alice in Wonderland,” but I want something more eye-catching than gaudy brown landscapes.

Anyone wanting a solid brainless movie with little thought in it will be thrown off by the last 20 minutes, which attempts to pull an “Inception” and make us all wonder how much of what we watched was real while adding some pseudo-inspiration philosophy about how we are the only ones that can make a difference in our own lives.

That last part is particularly funny, because half of the time we saw action scenes, the CGI versions of the girls prancing around. They didn’t make a difference in their lives, their computerized doppelgangers did.

That ending would have been a nice wrap up in another movie.

At that point, I had sat through two hours of girls defying gravity to fight dragons and robots and zombies.

I had the impression the whole time I was supposed to turn my brain off to enjoy the film. It was unfair to try to make people start thinking again before the lights in the theater had even come back on.

Very little is consistent or coherent in this movie.

However, the soundtrack is first rate. There are some fantastic covers of “Sweet Dreams,” “Where is My Mind,” “Asleep” and “White Rabbit,” with Browning lending vocals to most of them.

In fact, the soundtrack is the only consistently great thing in the movie.

I loved the first, say, 30 minutes of this movie, but as I wrote this review, I realized that I didn’t care for “Sucker Punch” as a whole much like I initially thought or wanted to.

It has its moments, but I was dismissing all the red flags because I have a soft spot for Zack Snyder.

So whether I made up your mind for you, at least I made up mine.