Rarely does a title so accurately describe the experience of watching a movie; Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is just that. It’s an unbearable exercise in tedium that blindsides the audience, a pandering ComiCon fanboy disaster; story, theme, continuity, coherency, and logic are gleefully tossed aside, all casualties of the oppressive, overbearing style.
It’s bold, no doubt; you can make sense of it, yes, and even foster a deep admiration and appreciation for Snyder’s strange new work. But why bother? Sucker Punch is pure torture to sit through.
Sure, there’s a pulsating hard rock score featuring covers of classic tunes, a menacing mental institution, a sleazy 30s-era nightclub, scantily-clad women in various stages of PG-13 undress, big guns, knives, and swords, giant samurai cyborgs, re-animated Nazi zombies, an Aliens/Avatar-like metal war machine, knights in armor battling Lord of the Rings-like Orc monsters, fire-breathing dragons, futuristic robots, an unstoppable train, and Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as a lobotomist.
There are ideas here, yes, and style to spare – Snyder previously made the graphic novel adaptations 300 and Watchmen – but the problem is in the presentation. There’s no internal logic to anything – no real reason for any of it – beyond the realm of the arbitrary. Snyder is effectively switching channels every few minutes, bouncing from idea to idea and showering us with visuals while locking us out of the story.
In a fitfully effective opening sequence – perhaps the only one in the film, told without dialogue or sound effects, just Emily Browning’s cover of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams – bleach-blonde, pigtailed Baby Doll (Browning) accidentally shoots her sister while trying to defend her from an evil stepfather, who wants the money their recently-deceased mother willed to them; Dad has Baby Doll institutionalized, and bribes one of the orderlies to arrange a lobotomy, which will be carried out in five days time.
Things are starting to get interesting, maybe, so Snyder pulls the rug out from under us: that’s the last time we see the asylum and this level of reality until the very end. Instead, we dive into Baby Doll’s fantasy world, a retro nightclub/brothel in which Baby Doll and (we presume) other inmates are now dancers facing similar oppression. The evil orderly is now Blue (Oscar Isaac), the sadistic proprietor; psychiatrist Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino) is now the girls’ madam.
With the help of Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), Baby Doll plots escape by obtaining five necessary items; as the girls obtain these items, the film shifts into further levels of fantasy, which include massive battle sequences set in a Japanese dojo, a WWI/WWII amalgamated battleground, a futuristic robot city, etc.
What we experience, effectively, are metaphors piled on top of metaphors: the girls need to obtain a map to escape the mental institution, they plan this in the nightclub fantasy sequence, and carry out the mission of obtaining the map on the fantasy warfront. Sitting in the audience, we have no way of interacting with these scenes: there’s a level of disconnect between each fantasy world, so while watching the first level of reality might have had some intrinsic tension or suspense, there is none by the time we get to the third. It’s Inception gone all horribly wrong.
Sucker Punch, and films like it, will often be dismissively compared to a video game, or to the experience of watching someone else play a video game; that’s an affront to video games, where we might watch a life meter go down when a player gets hit, or experience actual progress within a level.
Sucker Punch plays out more like a video game cutscene, something that bridges the gap between player or audience interaction.
What’s undeniable is that Sucker Punch represents a work of vision: from beginning to end, Snyder is in complete control of this steampunk striptease samurai zombie robot nightmare. It’s just a shame that he hasn’t provided the storytelling essentials that would allow an audience to interact with it. I think the filmmaker realized this by the end, but by the time hamfisted narration is addressing you, the viewer, this piece of junk is being laughed off the screen.
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