1 star (out of four)
The world of Sucker Punch is like the idyllic fantasy of a teenage boy who knows nothing of the outside world that hasn’t been presented to him in a video game. It is a world where the women are multidimensional only in their figures, where hackneyed one-liners pass as wisdom, and where gunfights occur not for any purpose but to fulfill the CGI quota. Writer-director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) has committed such cinematic offenses before but never in such quick succession and with so little in the way of justifiable context (also known as story). If Sucker Punch does have one thing going for it, it’s that the film is unapologetically childish, indulging in its “babes with guns” narrative just because.
In a prologue free of dialogue but heavy on slow motion, we learn that our pigtailed heroine (Emily Browning) – who gets no name other than Baby Doll – has just lost her mother, leaving her and her sister alone with their evil stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). He steals some creepy glances at them at the funeral and when he sexually assaults the sister, Baby Doll takes action. Unfortunately, her shot misses its target and she kills her sister instead, a mistake that lands her in an institution for the criminally insane.
Talk about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire; the whole institution appears to be run by slimy perverts who take turns ogling the all-female patients. Leading the pack is an orderly named Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) who asserts considerable authority in the asylum. He strikes a deal with the stepfather to ensure that Baby Doll is lobotomized before the police have a chance to question her and learn about any extenuating circumstances surrounding her crime. Why Blue would do such a terrible thing is baffling, though I suppose there is an unspoken understanding amongst movie pervs in situations like this.
From here the movie muddies up reality and the institution becomes a high-class brothel where Baby Doll and her fellow inmate babes learn to dance from the on-staff therapist, Dr. Vera Gorsky (Carla Gugino). Under the supervision of Blue, Dr. Gorsky prepares her patients for regular performances where they dance and service high-paying clients. Needless to say, the girls want to escape.
Baby Doll turns out to be a mesmerizing dancer, but we never actually see her moves. Whenever she starts to dance, the film transports us to computer-animated set pieces where she battles all sorts of foes. Outside a snowy dojo, she fights giant, mechanical samurai. In the trenches of WWI, she and the other girls slaughter German cyborgs. Next, they break into a castle to kill a dragon. Then they must stop a runaway train that holds a bomb guarded by futuristic robots. A mysterious man (Scott Glenn) acts like the Charlie to their Angels, appearing every time we enter the fantasy realm to explain what they need to do. In each case, Baby Doll must procure a tool that will aid her and her friends in their escape: a map, fire, a knife, a key.
The action scenes, exquisitely rendered though they may be, are all superfluous. The girls go through a lot of trouble to obtain the items in the fantasy worlds but they also have to find them in reality, which more or less nullifies the need for the elaborate action. The action itself often plays out like self-parody – absurd but not quite campy – in a feeble attempt to emulate every style of action present in the post-Matrix, post-Kill Bill cinematic landscape.
Though the movie borrows elements from a number of its contemporaries, this is the first entirely original feature from Zack Snyder, who previously remade Dawn of the Dead and adapted the graphic novels 300 and Watchmen. With Sucker Punch, he tries too hard to assert himself as the new fanboy auteur.
Mr. Snyder is not an untalented director and, for better or worse, he has a style he can call his own, but he could benefit from exercising a little restraint. To emphasize his film’s uncertain hold on reality, he underlines every scene with lyrically resonant songs (“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” “Where Is My Mind?”, “White Rabbit”). His overuse of slow motion and color saturation quickly grow tiresome. He overcompensates for a lack of substance with an excess of style.
One also wonders, with all the girl-power ass kicking his heroines deal out, if Mr. Snyder believes he has made a feminist film. For those wondering: he has not. Every woman in Sucker Punch is sexualized with scanty clothes and when they’re not firing automatic weapons, they’re giggling and fawning over each other in the dressing room. Mr. Snyder also proves himself adept at creating phallic imagery. The swords, the guns, the knife, the half-burnt cigar, the slit dragon’s neck, the train. Yes, yes, we get it!
There are a few moments, however, when the movie breaks from its self-imposed seriousness and provides some much-needed self-awareness. When asked by Dr. Gorka to rehearse a scene featuring a girl in a mental asylum, a patient named Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) objects. She gets why she’s dressed up like a schoolgirl and she understands how being drugged up might be a turn-on. But lobotomized vegetable? That’s too much. That Mr. Snyder is aware of what he’s doing to his actresses, however, only makes his degradation of them worse.
Maybe there is a way to view Sucker Punch from a feminist angle though. Let the sadistic orderly Blue Jones stand in for Mr. Snyder; the patients, symbols for the very actresses in the film. Now the movie becomes something of a tragedy where performing women sacrifice themselves to escape the prying eyes of an audience who demands to see their fantasies played out before them. That film might be a little heavy-handed, but it would no doubt be better than this mess.
- Steve Avigliano, 3/26/11
