#123. Sucker Punch - Review
Sunday, May 15, 2011 at 6:19PM 
Sucker Punch Banner Poster
In 2004 director Zack Snyder re-animated the struggling zombie genre with his comically gruesome Dawn of the Dead. Itself a remake of the 1978 George Romero classic of the same name, Snyder’s reimagining took advantage of over 25-years of technological advances in blood and guts to create the most stunningly graphic film in the genre. Every frame was covered with human viscera, his mise-en-scene dripping with mortal ichor. With Dawn of the Dead Snyder crawled out of the depths of music video hell, and forced his name down the throats of cinefiles and casual moviegoers alike. With three more feature films under his belt by 2010, the Green Bay, Wisconsin native had comfortably dug himself a comfy little niche within the industry. To put it simply, you know a Zach Snyder film when you see one. Making films specifically for the geek obsessed attention deficit generation; Snyder refuses to lose your interest, willingly throwing any image conceivable on screen to keep your eyes plastered and your mind from wandering. Lest we forget, this is the man who gave us a 30-foot blue penis to stare at, realistic physics and all.
Sucker Punch poster
His latest effort, the regrettably named Sucker Punch (2011), carries the mark of his earlier films, but does nothing more than prove the shallowness of his instincts. To call Sucker Punch a glorified music video would be an insult to the guy who was paid DGA minimum to direct the video of Rebecca Black’s follow-up to “Friday.” Offering less substance than a condom used by Michael J. Anderson, Sucker Punch overconfidently rests on its visual laurels, erroneously believing a film can look good without having anything to say. How can a film showcasing five beautiful women battling steampunk zombie German soldiers in World War I trench warfare be so boring? With little heart and even less sense, Sucker Punch pushes the boundaries of consumer’s interest, perhaps proving once and for all that audiences are not riveted by spectacle alone.
Recounting the plot of Sucker Punch should be a mandatory exercise for all Creative Writing majors with an emphasis in WTF. In a broad sense, Sucker Punch is can be broken down into three specific acts: the music video, the video game, and finally the dramatic ending. Taken alone, each section is mindlessly inexplicable, barely stringing together any glimpse of a coherent narrative. However, it is the combination of all three acts that truly mystifies.
Sucker Punch follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning) a young woman who is sent to an insane asylum by her evil child molesting stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) following the death of her mother and the accidental shooting her younger sister. The asylum is controlled by the ruthlessly and conniving Blue (Oscar Isaac), and his brainless henchmen, including his somewhat reluctant abettor and resident psychiatrist Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino). The Stepfather (he is never given a name) pays Blue to forge all of the paperwork needed to have the asylum’s doctor (Jon Hamm) perform a lobotomy on his poor stepdaughter. As the doctor’s hammer falls in slow motion towards the chisel that rests atop her eye socket, Baby Doll successfully escapes inside her imagination, apparently avoiding the inevitable vegetification that awaits her in reality, and presents a chance for her to somehow form a plan.
Sucker Punch poster
All of this plays out in the first 5-minutes of the film in a near wordless musical montage. Perhaps a recap is in order: In the first 300 seconds, give or take a minute or two, the protagonist is orphaned, catches her stepfather sexually assault her much younger sister, accidently commits murder, is deemed insane by a judge, sent to an insane asylum, and is about to be unlawfully lobotomized. There is little dialogue in the opening moments of the film; instead Snyder tries to create both emotion and interest with images and music. In his 2009 adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel, the director often chose tepid, on the nose pop songs to accompany the more melodramatic scenes in the film. Who could forget Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence echoing through the Comedian’s funeral, or Leonard Cohen serenading the outrageously graphic sex scene shared between Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson)? Two years later Snyder hasn’t so much evolved as just perfected his ability to choose the most hackneyed ballads. The film’s opening pageant of platitude blasts a desperately sullen cover of the Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, sung by the Browning herself, which may have been a smart decision if employing trite pop-hits as a tool for exposition was a good thing. Instead, like so many aspects of the film, Snyder mixes novelty with creativity and produces a clichéd disaster of an introduction.
There are three individual, albeit somehow connected dimensions of Baby Doll’s reality in which she must exist in Sucker Punch. The first is the actual real world that takes place in the asylum, where Baby Doll is joined by fellow inmates Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). The second world takes place inside Baby Doll’s head, where she transforms the insane asylum into a ritzy cathouse of sorts where the girls are forced to perform lurid strip teases for the club’s influential clientele. It is at this point the film’s somewhat forgivable, puerile set-up devolves into a vapid netherworld of shameless exploitation. Resembling a younger Al Pacino in Dick Tracy (1990), Blue runs the brothel with an iron fist, having no qualms killing any girl that disobeys or tries to escape.
Sucker Punch banner poster
To escape the brothel Baby Doll eventually learns she must find certain objects throughout the club to aid in the dancers’ escape. A map, fire, a butcher’s knife; each item is controlled by someone at the brothel. The map is in Blue’s office; the lighter is in a customer’s coat pocket and so on. To obtain each item Baby Doll must first lure them into a seductive trance with one of “special” stripteases, hypnotizing them with her beauty and giving one of the other dancers an opportunity to steal the treasure. Her dancing must be pretty impressive, because her gyrations charm her mark every time. For some reason Snyder refuses to allow the audience the pleasure of viewing one of these dances, purposefully cutting away as soon as Baby Doll begins to move her body. Snyder’s perception of what is empowering and what is exploitive is immediate and apparent. Nevertheless, while her mark is in a deep trance of desire, Baby Doll and her mates are then whisked away into a third dream world. That’s right, a dream within a dream. Sound familiar? In this third reality Baby Doll meets the Wise Man, her sensei of sorts who entrusts her with the weapons needed to survive in this never-never land. Played by the typically solid Scott Glen, the Wise Man is a laughable mix of Mr. Miyagi and David Carradine in Kung-Fu (1972), another silly addition to the film that probably sounded really cool at the time.
Sucker Puncher samurai giants
Although the items that the girls need to escape are all found somewhere in the brothel, they must join Baby Doll in the third dream world and find the items there as well. This is where Sucker Punch earns its admission price, willingly sacrificing reasonability for balls to the wall insanity. The map that was once hanging in Blue’s office that detailed the brothel’s floor plan is now the layout of German trenches in an alternate World War I reality. Employing giant robotic mechs to defend against a blitzkrieg of undead German soldiers, the fantastical setting is decked out in steampunk machinations. Snyder spared no expense in these beautiful fleets of fancy, with each item presenting a new, specifically themed adventure.
Sucker Punch banner poster
As exciting as shooting down a giant Zeppelin with a mechanized robot, or destroying a fire-breathing dragon with a samurai sword may be, it is difficult to achieve any emotional connection with the women in Sucker Punch. Their plight is non-existent when you realize both the heightened fantasy worlds and the brothel do not actually exist. It is all in Baby Doll’s pretty little head, a head that is about have long piece of metal jammed through it with a hammer. There are no stakes in the film, which means no concern, no build up. To effectively create a convincing narrative it is essential the film offer at least one person for the audience to care about. By having a vulnerable protagonist the audience becomes connected with his or her experiences throughout the picture, and eventually becomes invested in what is actually taking place on screen. The only thing the audience knows about Baby Doll before the lobotomy and her ensuing trip into la-la-stripperland is that she accidently shot her sister. By the time Baby Doll reaches the dreamworld the audience has more insight into Blue and the one-dimensional stepfather character than the film’s protagonist. When Rocket sacrifices herself so the other girls can escape a runaway train it is of no concern because even though she dies in the fantasy world, and then also dies in the brothel, Rocket as a person only ever existed in Baby Doll’s mind to begin with, thus negating any emotional response one might have.
Scott Glen in Sucker Punch
The prostitution, stripteases, and risqué outfits would all be more than ok if it wasn’t for how young some of the girls are made up to look. While actresses Abbie Cornish (28 years old) and Jena Malone (26 years old) look like adult women, Vanessa Hudgen’s (22 years old) Blondie, Jamie Chung’s (28 years old) Amber and especially Browning’s (22 years old) Baby Doll not only look as if they were underage but that their younger appearance was deliberate. In a film about ass kicking strippers some luridness is to be expected and welcomed with open arms, but when you put a catholic school girl outfit on a girl who looks about old enough to legitimately wear a catholic school girl outfit then that is where sexiness becomes uncomfortable, purposeful or otherwise.
Watching Sucker Punch feels like you are trapped in the mind of a pubescent teenage boy who fell asleep watching porn and playing Legend of Zelda on his Nintendo 3DS. Obviously unaware of the difference between titillation and temperance, Snyder’s misogynistic compulsions are so flagrant in this film it is hard to get angry with him; surely this blatant miscalculation of “girl-power” could have only been written by a man. Not unlike Lara Croft, who has been a video game staple for the last 15-years because of her laughably large chest and ability to brawl, gender roles are still easily confused within the action genre, often presuming sexual and violent exploits are by definition always empowering for women. Last year’s Kick-Ass was met with similar criticism for its portrayal of 11 year old Mindy Macready and her crime fighting alter-ego “Hit Girl.” The film portrays the pre-teen gleefully decapitating criminals and thugs, while spewing obscenities so vulgar it would cause the woman that currently holds the gangbang record to blush. Marketed as an empowering role model for young girls across the world, Hit Girl became the billboard for girl power, and the argument of what was reasonable and what was irresponsible continued. One-year later Baby Doll zips up her thigh-highs and grabs her samurai sword to spill more blood, except instead of battling crime in the streets of metropolitan America, she and her buxom sidekicks duke it out in a world of Swords & Stilettos inside Baby Doll’s brain. Of course the ridiculousness of this fleeting figment is undeniable. What teenage girl would manifest a dream world that requires her to sneak around a seedy brothel, scantily clad and forced to sacrifice her body for the sexual urges of her crude customers? A teenage girl envisioned by man, that’s who.
World War I steampunk zombieAs Baby Doll travels into her deeper dream worlds, the amount of clothing her and the other girls wear becomes less and less. Beginning with white patient outfits in the asylum, it is to be believed that Baby Doll would envision herself and the others wearing dominatrix style costumes in the brothel, and unbelievably even less clothing the in the fantasy realm. Snyder may have been trying to portray a group of women fighting against sexual oppression, but by progressively removing their clothing and exploiting their bodies he only serves to subvert his initial goal. The danger is evident, the oppression is unfortunate, and the sexual mistreatment is disgusting, but this is made all the more worse when confronted with the thought that Baby Doll is manifesting it all. In her reality it can be assumed her and her sister are both sexually mistreated, in the brothel her and her friends are sexually mistreated, beaten, and often times killed. Should it be some sort of relief when in the fantasy world the girls are just attacked by zombie Germans and blown-up by bombs? The idea that the brothel serves as visual metaphor for her reality is straightforward and clear, but what is incomprehensible is how any of the sexual abuse endured in the club or the physical harm of the fantasy world is in anyway a representation of that struggle. Snyder’s presumption is disturbing, only proving that the female voice is not only profoundly void in Hollywood at present time, but also completely misunderstood in today’s popular culture.
Sucker Punch poster
Sucker Punch has released at an interesting time in Hollywood. In a year of multiple graphic novel and comic book adaptations, a focus on 3-D and computer-animated spectacle, and way too many sequels to count (this Fall’s Puss n’ Boots is Dreamwork’s fifth entry into their Shrek franchise!), Snyder and Warner Bros. should be commended for taking a chance on a new intellectual property. Touting babes, guns, and monsters, with an interesting aesthetic and Snyder’s unique visual style, its less-than-stellar performance at the box office should all but guarantee big studios like Warner Bros will think twice before releasing a big tent-pole blockbuster that doesn’t have a number following the title. Was it audience interest, or their perception, that left Sucker Punch dead in the water? Domestic viewers have proved time and time again they are not interested in hyper stylized, high concept, exploitive fare. Films like the Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez 1970s throwback Grindhouse (2007) failed to earn back even half of its production budget domestically, despite the clever gimmick and the Weinstein powered marketing push. Snakes on a Plane (2006), The Wolfman (2010), and even Drive Angry 3D, the 2011 Nic Cage vehicle (uh thank you) that had the master of over acting playing an escapee from Hell trying to rescue his granddaughter in a muscle car, were all financial let downs despite their high budgets and an original premise. In 2009 director Zack Snyder and Warner Bros found out the hard way that even adapting a film from a beloved source does not guarantee success in the box office. His adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel, written by Alan Moore in 1986, was proof that ambition must be matched with skill. Listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century, the Watchmen book was considered un-filmable, with a plot and cast of characters so deliberately designed the less perceptive could easily misread it as convoluted. Although it could be said Snyder held too close to the source material, Watchmen was ultimately an interesting film that could not support the weight of its own narrative. While fanboy obsession and geek culture, and how they pertain and influence Hollywood trends, are evident in all of Snyder’s films, Sucker Punch still caters to his nerdy fan base, once again letting narrative coherency take a back seat to artificial artistry and clever genre mash-ups. Like Watchmen and 300 (2007) before it, Snyder’s focus on visual panache and digitally generated spectacle is almost always fun, but rarely interesting. The surprise box office success of 300 only served to secure this idea of pageantry over substance, however that time it was the chiseled bodies of the Spartan warriors that were being exploited. Typically violent and beautifully rendered, Snyder’s films are an achievement in exhibition. They are not unlike having sex with a genie that can only grant orgasms. Every scene offers at least one visual climax, with something cool, albeit computer generated and hollow, kicking ass and looking sexy in slow motion. Imagine orgasm after orgasm with no foreplay, no buildup? Films like 300 and Sucker Punch do not concern themselves with turning their audience on, delicately making sure the viewer is ready and prepared. Instead Snyder wastes no time jamming his over stylized, sexually pre-occupied images deep inside the eye sockets of anyone holding a ticket, brutally forcing himself inside their tender psyches.
Baby Doll / Emily Browning in Sucker Punch
But as long as it feels good loyal audience members should willingly come back for more. In the case of Sucker Punch, Snyder fails as a storyteller, but continues to amaze as a filmmaker. While steampunk zombies, giant flying dragons, and runaway trains are captivating, Snyder’s inability to deny his own id is too distracting for the viewer to completely commit. This film is a perfect example of just how much can go wrong when a director’s budget is as extravagant as his imagination. With no boundaries an artist is unchained, free to follow every silly whim to its ridiculous completion. Sucker Punch proves director’s cannot be unrestricted, that self-governing is impossible when there are no tethers.
The ladies of Sucker Punch are underwritten and over emphasized; perhaps they are actually convinced their characters are speaking against sexism and gender roles in today’s geek infested cinema instead of simply playing into them. Either way this film is an unmistakable and unfortunate failure, a film about women that has no heart and all balls.
(#124. Watchman, #125. 300, & #126. Dawn of the Dead)
Reader Comments (3)
Whatever it was, it definitely entertained the senses! I loved it, thought it was a great mind trip that kept me guessing.
I've tried watching this twice now this last week and just could not give a shit about it. Sorry if I missed something but this is the longest goddamn review ever and I only skimmed it. There has just been SO little explanation, and it bores me to death! Babydoll does a dance (maybe this is explained further later, but after 3 dance/action scenes I just want to be done) and they get a map. Babydoll does a dance and they get a knife, who cares! I never in my life would have thought that watching 5 babes beat the shit out of everything that moves could be so uninteresting! Its pretty, very pretty, but nothing more for me... And fuck Bjork, seriously.
Yeah, in 3000 words I basically said this movie was aggressively awful