Unfortunately, the film is also painfully juvenile with a target audience of adolescent boys who define their world as being surrounded by bullies and beautiful, unobtainable girls "in real life", and bad guys, dragons and demons to kill with various cool and hyper-aggressive weapons in their virtual, video-game-fueled lives. It's no surprise that the women in the film are all costumed in fetishistic outfits with plunging necklines, bare midriffs, über-short skirts and long stockings. They're all very sexy but, unsurprisingly, there's no actual sex in the film.

Sucker Punch starts out with a dark, moody sequence where late teen blonde waif Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is trapped in a gothic monstrosity of a house with her scary, leering stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). When she rejects his advances after her mom has passed away, he turns his attentions to her little sister, to which Baby reacts by finding a gun and shooting him. She misfires and her sister ends up killed and his revenge is to have her locked up in the home for the mentally insane.

And that's where it switches from a delightfully creepy horror film into an incoherent genre mashup. Baby Doll meets the other babes in distress that become her posse: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). They're all required to act out erotic plays in the speakeasy then entertain individual customers, through which we realize that all the women in Sucker Punch are victims of sadistic men, and that there are no bad women -- or good men -- in the entire narrative.

Sucker Punch is a mess. The storyline barely makes sense and the constant transitions from fantasy to "reality", era to era, genre to genre, left me asking "WTF?" more than once during the movie. By the end it was just exhausting and while the effects were splendid, the storyline was too weak to sustain it. I can only recommend this for adolescent men who want to see their soft porn mixed with a strong dose of video game visuals and effects.

The story is based on Alan Glynn's novel "The Dark Fields" about a drug that rewires your brain so that instead of having access to the usual 20% of your neural capacity, you can utilize all of your brain. Every memory is eidetic, everything you've ever seen, heard, learned, touched, tasted can instantly be integrated into your experiences and, as Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) learns, you can master foreign languages in just a day or two and become an accomplished pianist in about the same time. Who wouldn't revel in a drug that offered that capability?

Problem is, to make a movie you need drama, tension, good and bad characters and it's the interplay between them that makes things interesting and engaging. In Watchmen, for example, the ultimate bad guy is the smartest man on Earth, because he's smart enough to see the inevitable progression of man and society. In Limitless, they couldn't decide whether to make it a morality play about Morra gaining abilities as "Enhanced Eddie" at the price of his humanity, or to simply let him be the protagonist overcoming a variety of increasingly ridiculous obstacles, which made for an awful confusing narrative.

The least coherent character in the film is his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish) who dumps Eddie for being a do-nothing slacker at the beginning of the film, then finds him attractive once he starts taking NZT-48 (as the mystery drug is called), then dumps him when she realizes his newfound attitude is due to drugs. It's a distinctly post-modern conscience.

With a stronger director and a tighter focus on the point of the story, Limitless could have been a splendid movie. It certainly had its fair share of excitement, interesting visual effects and attractive actors and shooting locations. But it's a confection without any substance, a film without a narrative soul, and as such, ended up leaving this critic wishing for something that had a point to make and a more satisfying conclusion.