SUCKER PUNCH(2011)
(Directed by Zack Snyder)
"Pfft...I've been sucker punched."- Signed by MartialHorror.
Plot: A girl is wrongly placed in an insane asylum, and she creates her own ‘worlds’, in order to ‘escape’.
Review:
When I first saw the trailer for “Sucker Punch”, I wasn’t sure if I had just witnessed something incredible cool or incredibly stupid. Yet I had no doubt in my mind that I would see it, good or bad. Zack Snyder, one of the most interesting directors in Hollywood, has the tendency to surprise us. He made the “Dawn of the Dead” remake passable, he floored me with “300” and I even liked the uneven “Watchmen”. So despite the fact it looked goofy and the critics were panning the hell out of it, I figured I’d at least enjoy the film as sheer entertainment. Much to my horror, “Sucker Punch” sucker punched me, delivering a painfully dull and ponderously pretentious film. How the hell does this happen?!
Baby Doll(Emily Browning; yes, get used to these stupid names) is heartbroken when her Mother passes away, leaving her and her sister with their demented step-father(Gerard Plunkett). The Step-father, after learning he didn’t inherit his wife’s money, attacks the sisters in a drunken rage. Baby Doll eventually does overpower him, but accidentally kills her sister in the process. The Step-father retaliates by institutionalizing her. He’s made a deal with an orderly(Oscar Isaac), so that in 5 days, she will be lobotomized. Baby Doll begins a rough relationship with the other patients, but somehow imagines the institution to be a brothel. She wants to escape, and for some reason when she dances, she is able to create a world of her own imagination where she can acquire the items needed for her escape……..yeah……
Let me start with this: I SHOULD LOVE THIS MOVIE! The idea of hot chicks with samurai swords fighting undead Nazis, giant demonic samurai, robots, dragons and orcs……How is this NOT the most badass movie ever made? 90% of the problem is that all of this was put in the WRONG plot. If Zack Snyder wanted to make a movie about this, he should’ve simply have made it about a chick killing off all these creatures. Instead, with this films plot, the action feels largely irrelevant. It serves NO purpose in this whole movie. It’s padding. For those who think I’m being too much of a stuffy critic, you should know that I loved “The Expendables”. In that film, the action was the plot and the plot was the action. It was what it was. The action in this movie has nothing really do with the plot, making it superfluous in the worst sense. Imagine “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” except the film breaks apart its narrative with characters imagining themselves fighting undead nazi’s, demonic samurai, robots and dragons……Actually, that sounds awesome! I SHOULD STILL LOVE THIS MOVIE!
Zack Snyder allegedly started working on the film in 2007, so I’m presuming that he wasn’t trying to rip off Christopher Nolan’s excellent “Inception”, although the plot does share similarities with “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Chronicles of Narnia” I guess(in that the characters are using imaginary worlds in order to escape their own). My problem however is that none of the dream sequences make any sense. First off, why does Baby Doll imagine the institution as a brothel? It’s possible that sexual abuse was going on, but doesn’t that beat the whole purpose of the whole “this is your own world” aspect? Why would you replace your current hell with another hell? Furthermore, the film could’ve worked if the (extreme) imaginary sequences tended to represent anything. The film takes place in the 1950’s, so having the Nazi’s and Samurai being the enemies almost makes sense(as WW2 had only recently happened)……but they never drive that home enough for it to feel intentional. Did Baby Doll’s dad get killed in World War 2 or something? The reason these questions are not answered is because Zack Snyder didn’t care about the questions OR the answers. He didn’t want to make a carefully crafted film like “Inception”, where the visuals always seem to mean something. Snyder wanted to make a film full of visuals that looked cool. To be fair, I heard a lot of the film was left on the editing floor, so maybe at one point this DID have a stronger narrative where its visuals meant something. Who knows!
Which leads us to the films most important part: The visuals. By default, I will say that the CGI was pretty cool and Snyder does have moments of creativity in his framing(the scene of the dragon munching on the ship is shot from inside of said ship). As you can expect from him, there’s lots of ‘atmospheric’ CGI(it’s very orange) and loads of slow motion……At first, I thought I would like the film more than not. When Baby Doll confronts the demonic samurai, I thought the battles were superb. The difference in scale between the two fighters, mixed in with the excellent sound design, was great and surprisingly unique. After this, however, the battles become more ‘gun’ oriented and the editing becomes much quicker and less coherent. The blaring soundtrack(which I usually didn’t like) simply became noisy and disorienting. Eventually ALL of the action simply became an incomprehensible, blurred mess to me. Hence, there was nothing else for me to grab onto, although the acting was okay(I did like Browning).
I believe Snyder is mostly to blame for the films faults. Directors SHOULD NOT write. Directors, by definition, are more visual. They can improve or expand upon narratives, but they cannot create them. They can only tell a story, adding a few touches, but they cannot make stories. Snyder happens to be more of a visual director than most. He thinks in terms of visuals. Therefore, he probably was thinking about all the kickass action before he thought of a story. That would usually be fine, but the story and action in this movie don’t go well together, so Snyder’s strengths actually have become a weakness. A director with similar faults is Wes Craven. When Craven is reeled in and contained, his ideas can only serve the script(therefore, classics like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are born). But when he’s allowed to do anything he wants, we have to contend with shit like “My Soul to Take”, where Craven’s good ideas trip over eachother, ruining the effect. That’s what I felt about “Sucker Punch”. Snyder is unable to create the right script for these visuals, but thinks he is making something ‘deep’. The dialogue is immensely self-important(why was Scott Glenn in this movie anyway? What was he representing?), the twists are illogical and nonsensical, and the narrative is broken. 30% of this movie was relevant. 70% was padding. Fans of the film seem to have enjoyed the padding(the action), so it’s not like I have the final word on that. But the action did nothing for me, so the films faults were just that much more glaring.
Violence: Rated PG-13 worthy.
Nudity: Nothing explicit, surprisingly.
Overall: If it looks good to you, then you might as well check out “Sucker Punch”. If the action doesn’t appeal to you, however, you might have your hands on the worst movie of 2011(so far). I'm in that camp and I'm still in shock over how much I disliked this.
1.5/4 Stars