The film calls to mind the kind of thing SuckerPunch was satirizing, offering Potts a few moments of action but completely shortchanging her as a character with her own agency.
In one of the movie's better running gags, she proves it again and again when she delivers a vicious suckerpunch to the throat of anyone foolish enough to threaten her well-being.
It's no surprise all this could lead to Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman clashing swords in the comic-book-and-videogame-inspired movie "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (2010), or Emily Browning facing a giant samurai in "Sucker Punch" (2011).
The realistic scenario is that Obama, hand extended to Damascus, is setting himself up for a sucker punch--potentially at great cost not only to America and Israel but to other democratic states and any democratic dissidents inside Syria who have not yet vanished into the care of Assad's secret police.