Review: SUCKER PUNCH
Spoiler Warning!
Do you remember when MTV and VH1 only played marathons of music videos? Consider Sucker Punch your brief, nostalgic throwback then. The film plays like a dozen videos strung together but instead of commercial breaks we get five minute interludes of bare-bones character development as director Zack Snyder quickly rushes us to the next set piece. Snyder, no doubt inspired by the Swedish chef of Muppet fame, bangs every pot and pan in the kitchen together whilst covered in flour and muttering nonsense. Sucker Punch is a concoction of crazy, beauty, and ambition: part Kill Bill-choreography, part Moulin Rouge-flair, and part Inception-dreamscape with a titch of Shutter Island-insanity. Filled with feisty, red-hot females, Emily Browning’s Baby Doll leads a cast of would-be heroines against an onslaught of piggish men, except for the horribly underused and suave Jon Hamm who gives urgency to the three scenes that he’s in. Unfortunately, the end result is an unsatisfying visual feast. There’s no doubt that the movie is gorgeous; Snyder can out film most directors out there, but I think someone needs to tell him that his camera isn’t the most important character.
Sucker Punch takes place within three different planes of existence: Baby Doll’s reality, Baby Doll’s fantasy of the reality, and Baby Doll’s fantasies that she has within her fantasies. The first plane has newly orphaned Baby Doll institutionalized by her widowed step father/live-in child molester after she tries to kill the bastard but accidentally shoots her younger sister instead. At the asylum, the step dad pays a little extra to the institute’s manager, Blue Jones, to have Baby Doll lobotomized, and so our story begins.
We quickly jump into the next plane of Baby Doll’s mind, but in this world, instead of being institutionalized, Baby Doll is an actual orphan who is turned over to a high-end burlesque, also run by Blue Jones; cue the Moulin Rouge references and the perpetuation of the forced sex and abandonment themes. Here, Baby Doll convinces four other girls that they all need to escape, and the band of scantily clad breakout queens plot their exit. In this reality, Baby Doll is apparently some kind of bordello phenom, though we never get to see her dance. Instead, we go into her imagination (again) where we find her and the girls put in elaborate, death-defying (well, almost) scenarios. This third plane represents two things: 1. Baby Doll’s survival instincts; 2. the inspiration behind her off-screen erotic dances. Conceptually it’s a cool idea, but in practice it’s misguided and ends up muddling the story more than making it captivating.
While inventive and visually stunning, the third plane is absolutely pointless to the grand scheme of the story. Sucker Punch is a stripped-down version of The Great Escape. It’s a caper movie but instead of just showing one of the girls sneak into an office to steal a map, we’re given a scene where the girls play a kick-ass Special Forces team that takes on an army of Nazi zombies. Is it cool? Oh, yes, very. Does it do anything for the story? Nope. It’s literally an excuse to swap out a thirty-second infiltration to snatch a miscellaneous object for a ten-minute sci-fi war movie.
Baby Doll’s character is so conceptually fascinating that not only does it put the others to shame, but when the story takes a major, but unsurprising, left turn late in the second act the result leaves you melancholy, because the payoff is part of a story that was never set up, and Baby Doll’s journey feels unresolved despite her sacrifice. Actually, the entire film kind of feels like that. It’s revealed late in the game that this is Sweet Pea’s (Abbie Cornish) story, but it isn’t at all. Instead of being profound, the idea of the film switching perspectives on a dime (it doesn’t) is absurd, because there is nothing that we’ve seen of Sweet Pea’s character up to this point that would lend itself to being compelling. Apparently, she sacrificed her old life to join her sister, Rocket (Jena Malone), at the burlesque to protect her, but that’s all of the information we get on the matter. Yet, I’m supposed to feel relieved or impressed when Sweet Pea escapes the place, while Baby Doll distracts the last group of guards. C’mon! You need a lot more fleshed out, dynamic story to sell that one.
You also have the Jon Hamm’s High Roller, an obviously wealthy man that Blue Jones has been prepping Baby Doll for. The problem is that High Roller is built up to be some kind of massive obstacle that Baby Doll must overcome, but instead we’re given a shot of the High Roller strolling into the burlesque with a couple of girls in his arm. That’s it. Apparently, the audience is supposed to fill in the blanks, but I find the self-destruction of the film’s third act to be more compelling than what wasn’t shown on screen.
Somewhere on the cutting room floor are the missing stage performances by the girls, Baby Doll’s erotic dance numbers and the rest of the character development, including a scene of Baby Doll making out with the High Roller, apparently. If Sucker Punch ends up like Watchmen and we get an extended addition/director’s cut with all of the scenes that should have been in the movie in the first place, then I have no doubt that I’ll be more than thrilled with that product.
Sucker Punch was my first must-see movie of 2011. I’ve been a Snyder fan since the Dawn of the Dead remake hit screens in ’04. In his short Hollywood filmmaking career, he’s established himself as one of the best visual directors, but just like others who have easily recognizable signature styles (like Michael Bay, for instance), Snyder’s critics will always attack his storytelling first.
300 worked because at the heart of the film there are relatable characters that are fighting for what they believe in. You can call the film shallow and paper thin, but Leonidas and his Spartan warriors’ sacrifice is impactful, because you know what they’ve gone through, what they’ve lost, and what they’ll leave behind with their final heroic act. Many movies wish they had endings that worked so well. Snyder turned around and gave us his adaptation of Watchmen, a movie that I love, which may have ultimately suffered from too much story as the film sank under its own self-perceived grandeur. Then we get his first flight into animation with Legend of the Guardians; a film that’s beautiful, derivative, simple, and charming; another mixed bag. Sucker Punch probably has more in common with the Owls of Ga’hoole than the vigilantes of Watchmen, however.
Sucker Punch is drop-dead gorgeous, but its storytelling style is so convoluted and irrelevant that all of the potential of the characters is squandered by Snyder’s attempt to create an epic with very little actually being compelling. Sucker Punch gives us the unrestrained Zack Snyder, and the film is probably representative of what the director would consistently give us if he didn’t have to report to studio execs and had all the money in the world to make his movies. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it might be a little much for the general populace to swallow.
Overall: 5/10
Directed by Zack Snyder. Screenplay by Zack Snyder & Steve Shibuya. Production Design by Rick Carter. Cinematography by Larry Fong. Original Music by Tyler Bates & Marius De Vries. Edited by William Hoy.
Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, and Scott Glenn.
