City figures in action-fantasy plot

I recently watched the trippy action fantasy, “Sucker Punch,” in Blu-ray on an HDTV.

This was not at my home, of course, where our TV is so old it runs on lamp oil.

No, it was in my friend’s fabulous man cave, where I want to be buried when I die (I haven’t told him yet, but I have been looking at plots).

I am not going to review “Sucker Punch” except to say that I think director Zack Snyder was trying to make a feminist statement, and like a lot of geeky male filmmakers before him, he could envision only one way to go about that: by populating his film with sex kittens, sexual predators, exotic dancers, child-women in peril, and lady assassins whose dress code is predictably impractical.

Would it have killed Snyder to make one of the secret agents a woman in Birkenstocks who doesn’t shave her legs and lectures the other assassins about the social ramifications of wearing perfume?

But I am not going to sit here and try to claim that I am immune to the universal erotic allure of beautiful women in lingerie fighting giant samurai and robot Nazis.

I would describe “Sucker Punch” as a perfect home entertainment option, where you can relax in the comfort of your living room without having to worry about being ejected from the multiplex for having sneaked beer into the theater.

Whatever misgivings I might have had about the film while watching it were entirely dispelled by “Sucker Punch’s” surprising yet inevitable ending.

Now, I am a person who hates revealing too many plot details about movies that some readers may not have seen yet, but I am about to do just that right now.

So if you still plan to see “Sucker Punch,” read no further.

The women of “Sucker Punch” endure a lot of suffering in the film, although it’s not always easy to tell how much of that suffering is real and how much is hallucinated. Which is to say, you never know how sorry you should feel for any of them.

I hallucinate suffering all the time and no one ever feels sorry for me.

I think it’s safe to say that, as an example of non-traditional storytelling, “Sucker Punch” makes “Inception” look like Dr. Seuss’ “Hop on Pop.” However, the ending has unexpected poignancy.

A single survivor of all the cartoonish carnage with the environmentally friendly and nutritionally conscious name of Sweet Pea is given a chance for a new life. She arrives at a bus station with the police hot on her heels.

A magic bus arrives, which is being driven by Scott Glenn, who plays a succession of mystical gurus throughout the film.

Like Obi Wan Kenobi before him, Glenn convinces the weak-minded cops that she is not the Sweet Pea they are looking for. So Sweet Pea boards a bus headed to the only place where she will be safe from the world’s madness: Fort Wayne.

Yes, Fort Wayne.

You may be asking yourself as we did, “Is this a special copy of the disc that was tailored specifically for the Fort Wayne market?”

While Hollywood regularly invests that kind of money in the northeast Indiana market, it does not seem to have been the case with “Sucker Punch.”

A brief Google search reveals that Fort Wayne was Sweet Pea’s destination in every English-language copy of the film, and perhaps some foreign language copies as well (Summit City in German is Gipfel-Stadt).

I assure you that this is presented sincerely in the film not satirically (at no point does Glenn threaten to show her all the places in Fort Wayne where Harry Baals hung out).

I saw this movie a day after MSN Real Estate and Local Market Monitor selected Fort Wayne as one of the top 10 “Best Places for Starting Over.”

Because I am one of those rubes who believes that there are no coincidences in life, I couldn’t help but ask aloud, “What could this mean?” and then sob for 10 minutes like the guy in the double rainbow video.

What does Zack Snyder know about Fort Wayne that I don’t know he knows?

Here’s one thing I do know: Fort Wayne really is a great place to start over.

I once did it myself.

When I arrived 15 years ago here wearing nothing but lingerie torn by robot Nazis, I was not a big fan of this place.

I had lived in Buffalo, N.Y., western Massachusetts and central New Jersey, and Fort Wayne had very few of the features I thought I needed to be happy back then.

A decade and a half later, I am flat-out in love with this place.

Fort Wayne is a great place to start over and a great place to keep going.

I know plenty of far cooler people than myself who feel the same way.

I have introduced you to a few of them in this column and I would love to introduce you to a few more.

But first, I have to pick Sweet Pea up at the bus station.