Zack Snyder is one of those directors who can be polarizing. For full disclosure, I’m more in the “he abuses slow motion and dramatic poses” camp than I am in the “he’s a visionary director with a unique vision” one. Or, more specifically, I can say that I absolutely hated 300, and I had an overall positive reaction to Watchmen, even though it did a few things that annoyed me. 300 was the epitome of style over substance. All it had to offer was slow motion shots of overly muscled goons fighting in front of swirly CG backdrops while the frame rate got routinely sped up and slowed down. I’m not even sure there was a script to that movie. Conversely, Watchmen had a pretty interesting story and some interesting characters. The slowed down, balletic fight scenes annoyed me a little bit and seemed out of place with the material, but it didn’t break the film. The story was told competently. Probably not coincidentally, I find much of Frank Miller’s comic work to be slack jawed idiocy, while I find Alan Moore’s to always be at least intriguing. My big question going into Sucker Punch wasn’t what kind of movie it was going to be; it was how Zack Snyder was going to do presenting original material. Well now I know, and the answer is not so well.
First of all, if I hadn’t told you that Sucker Punch was an original work, you’d never believe it from watching the movie. Every bit of it screams that it was adapted from some sort of video game, or some sort of Japanese comic book. Some shots in the film look more like game footage than they do something from a live action film. That wouldn’t be important if it seemed like Sucker Punch was made from a good video game or a good Japanese comic book, but sadly that isn’t the case. Five minutes into the film and I already wasn’t sure if what I was watching was legitimately slowed down due to Snyder’s usual go-to style, or if it was just from the actors naturally slowing down their performances to make sure that the melodrama was all sinking it. The first bit of the film is told solely through slow motion montage, there is little if any dialogue at all. Everything is super dramatic reaction shots set to booming music and slooooow photography. To not annoy, this is the last time I’m going to mention the slowness, but just keep in mind that it colors every second of every Snyder film, and it is absolutely egregious. This is where the inherently interesting story of Watchmen came in and saved that film, but with Sucker Punch there is no hero waiting in the wings. Once the plot progression turns from silent montage to stilted dialogue, you start to wish that it would just shut up again.
The story we get is of a teenage girl named Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who is orphaned early in the movie, and subsequently thrown into a mental institution after getting violent with an abusive caretaker. Once in the institution there is a countdown to when she will be lobotomized by a visiting physician; she has five days to find a way out. That’s all me simplifying the situation though. In reality, once she enters the institution the movie goes into a fantasy world where it is not so much a mental hospital but a whore house/burlesque club. The other patients become call girls. The doctors are madams and pimps. Why this change happens isn’t ever explicitly stated, you kind of just have to go with it. On her first day Baby Doll is sent to dance class. During her dance routines she is sent to yet another fantasy world, one in which a mystical old man (Scott Glenn) tells her of the five items that she must obtain in order to escape from the whatever it is she’s really locked up in. The items are arbitrary, the way she keeps slipping deeper into different fantasy worlds is never explained, and the effect is quite disorienting. But her fantasy quests into increasingly stylistic and violent worlds become the forward thrust of the film. We get a checklist of items that must be obtained, and four game levels she must navigate to do it. It’s not quite a story, but at least it’s a structure. It’s better than narrative aimlessness. And so, with the help of a cadre of mental patient/hookers, Baby Doll goes from fantasy world to fantasy world, killing things, blowing stuff up, and collecting the items that will inexplicably lead to her release. Or so some old guy who came out of nowhere randomly tells us. If Inception suffered a bit in being too wordy and too explicit about explaining its different levels of dream world, then this movie goes in the complete opposite direction, never explaining how we go from the first reality we are presented with to the second. Therefore, by the time we get to the third layer, there is no sense as to whether what we’re watching has any real consequence whatsoever, and the whole mess of killing things and collecting items ends up feeling pretty hollow. But at least the video game insanity of the film’s big quests outshines the dialogue scenes that haphazardly string them together. There’s no worse filmgoing experience than listening to the girls of Sucker Punch arguing over a “plan” that is nothing of the sort while the filmmakers almost visibly tap their toes, impatient to get to the next screen saver showoff. I’m not even going to mention the inexplicable, gibberish nonsense of the book ending voice over narration. Except for just then.
Given all of that, I guess it’s up to the action scenes to be thrilling enough to prop up the rest of the film. Seeing as this is a movie almost exclusively concerned with flashy action, you would imagine that would be no problem. You would imagine wrong. All of the action sequences in this film are CG laden, cartoony bullshit. There is no weight to any of the fighting, no impact, no consequence. Right off, as soon as the action starts, we see a 90 lb girl slammed through concrete and then get up without a scratch on her. There seems to be no rules as to what is and isn’t possible in this universe, and consequently there are no stakes. Every bit of action that Sucker Punch gives us is about hyper-stylized, hyper-fake choreography. At no point will you feel that the protagonists are in any threat of death, any pain. Action scenes work because of the thrill, because of the danger. There is nothing here but flash, and it only takes a couple of minutes before it stops being impressive and starts being numbing. At one point we get a castle siege story where a giant dragon gets into a dogfight with fighter planes. It doesn’t come close to reaching the level of thrills or excitement that How to Train Your Dragon was able to create in a movie for children. Probably because the things that happened in that movie happened to three-dimensional characters that you cared about, and the fight sequences carried actual consequences for them. The difference between this movie, which was a failure, and a movie that did the same thing successfully, like the original Matrix, is world building. The Matrix was stylized, out of this world action; but it made its rules clear, and it stuck to them. Unfortunately, that film has spawned an entire decade of imitators that have tried to do the same thing but haven’t taken the same care to make sure it works, including the awful sequels.
And it’s a shame that it doesn’t work, because there could have been very hefty consequences at stake here if these characters were treated like real people existing in a real world. We have a group of young women, locked up and abused, and fighting for their freedom. It’s a borderline feminist empowerment story if it was done right. But it’s too one dimensional and too exploitive to work on any level like that. All of the men in this movie are bloated, monstrous, disgusting pigs. They’re all lecherous, abusive rapists, who only have physical characteristics to set them apart. One is fat, one is greasy, etc… They make for such hacky, mustache-twirling villains that the movie begins to play like one big, extended rape scene. Picture Irreversible if the entire runtime was spent with Monica Bellucci struggling against penetration. Okay, that’s probably a bit much, but picture it anyway. I suppose that Glenn’s Wise Man character is an exception, but he isn’t presented as a person at all. He’s more of a disembodied observer of the story akin to The Stranger from The Big Lebowski, but infinitely less self aware about what a ridiculous conceit he is. But no, there isn’t really any female empowerment here, it’s mostly just hot looking chicks kicking a lot of ass. Probably it’s hard to be inspiring to a feminist cause when all you’re doing is giving me a boner.
One bright point of the film is the performances of most of the girls. Despite being diminutive waifs, they all look competent throwing punches and shooting guns. And despite the fact that the dialogue is a complete afterthought, they do their best to present it with a certain gravity. Emily Browning’s job is mostly to let concern and sadness play over her face, and she manages to be very expressive without crossing the line into hammy. Jena Malone plays Rocket, the sort of hard-nosed, troubled girl. She gets the second amount of stuff to do next to Browning and I always believed her delivery, even though she got some of the most melodramatic moments in the film.
Abbie Cornish plays Sweet Pea, Rocket’s older sister, and the tough, weathered member of the group. Mostly she’s there to be stubborn and oppose Baby Doll’s newfound sense of authority, and somehow she manages to do so without making her character completely contemptible. Rounding out the group of girls are Vanessa Hudgens as Blondie and Jamie Chung as Amber. They get a little bit less to do than the other girls and are mostly just there as window dressing. Hudgens gets one big emotional moment, and she does fine with it, but Chung’s character is kind of a blank page. And she came off as the least polished actress of the bunch. Plus, she was the only one that didn’t even really get a cutesy name; it makes you start to think that the only reason she was cast in the film at all is that they needed a pretty Asian for the sake of the fetish. Aside from the girls there are two bigger adult roles. Carla Gugino plays Dr. Gorski, the woman who teaches the girls all of their stripper techniques. She has a bit of a ridiculous accent going on, but other than that she manages to lend a veteran presence to the film. Gugino’s inclusion in the film adds it a bit of credibility and class. The other big role is that of Blue Jones, the head of the institute; played by Oscar Isaac. He overacts to the point of distraction. I think somebody may have misinformed him that this movie shoot was actually an audition for Baz Luhrman’s next screen musical. Whatever he was trying to pull off, every time he was on the screen I was sighing and shaking my head at how cheesy his performance was and how broad he was going in an attempt to steal the film. Note to actors, when your co-stars are girls in their early twenties wearing next to nothing, turns out it isn’t your movie to steal.
And if there’s one thing that the movie does very well, it’s presenting us with sexy girls. Even while I found myself disengaged by the story or disappointed by the action, I never completely tuned out of the film, and that’s largely because of how it was able to cast beautiful girls and shoot them in interesting ways. So that’s how this movie works, on the surface level only. But Sucker Punch isn’t a case of style over substance, as it would probably like you to believe; it’s style alone and no substance at all. And the style, while pretty to look at in places, is often more tacky than anything. I think that’s what’s so infuriating about this movie to me. Zack Snyder may not be the visionary director that the studio would like to market him as, but he’s a highly competent one. He is a skilled photographer, and is able to oversee the creation of digital effects better than many. There are tons of movies that get made that are worse than Snyder’s. He’s no Uwe Boll. But that’s why he’s so frustrating. I don’t care about what Uwe Boll makes because it’s obviously going to be shallow crap. He seems incapable of creating anything else. But with Snyder, he has the potential to rise to the occasion and make something good if given the right material to work with and if he would reign in his stylistic fetishes. Making something look slick is good, making it look slick in the same way over and over gets rather tedious. Filling a movie with crazy action can be fun and exciting, but not without an understanding of what makes action work in addition to a sense of what action looks like. And still, I know there is going to be a huge contingent of people out there telling everyone who didn’t like this movie to “turn their brains off” and “just have fun” while watching it. I would argue that without the bare bones of competent storytelling in place, it’s impossible for something to be fun. Watching a disjointed mess of a movie, for thoughtful people, is anything but fun. It’s a chore. If you’re able to accept a movie like Sucker Punch for what it is and just have a good time with it, I would stop and ask yourself why. Is it really because you’re more laid back and fun loving than everyone else, or is it because you’re too simple and thoughtless in your film consumption to understand the difference between stylish action films that work like The Matrix and ones that lack the essential qualities of an enjoyable experience like this? If you have a brain, it’s simply not possible to turn it off. That would mean you’re dead.
