Sucker Punch

On Saturday, I went to see 300 and Watchmen director Zack Snyder's newest movie, Sucker Punch. A movie that pushed all of the right geek buttons with its debut trailer, and had me excited to see how it turned out. However, early reviews of the movie seemed to be universally awful, so I went into the cinema preparing myself for the first major disappointment since Wolverine.

The absolutely stunning Emily Browning stars as Babydoll, a 20 year old girl who is framed for the murder of her little sister, and institutionalised by her stepfather in order to get his hands on the inheritance her mother left to them. The owner of the asylum (Oscar Isaac) forges the doctor's (Carla Gugino) signature in order to authorise a lobotomy and then that right there is where the story stops making sense.

Without either warning or explanation the movie changes locations to a brothel in which her and four other patients called Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (a very un-blonde Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung) dance to impress potential clients. We're expected to believe that all of this is a figment of Baby's imagination, in order to escape the horrors of her reality, which strikes me as odd considering the entire point of this movie is that she was wrongly put into the asylum, so she shouldn't be suffering from delusional fantasies. Carla Gugino's character (now the brothel's madam) then forces Babydoll to dance, which seems to entrance everybody in the room and send Babydoll and the other girls into yet another set of delusions.

From here, the movie is basically a videogame that you have no control of. A "wise man" informs the girls that to escape the brothel/asylum they will need to collect five items - a map, fire, a knife, a key and a fifth mystery item. So the girls decide to use Babydoll's hypnotic dancing powers to distract people so that they can collect the items. Each dance transports them to the delusion in which all five girls have super powers, wield swords and heavy weaponry and fight swarms of robots, chaingun wielding samurai golems, dragons and steampunk zombie Prussian soldiers. This is where the main focus of Sucker Punch is... the completely over the top action set-pieces featuring sexy scantily clad girls in Snyder's trademark slow-motion/fast-motion. It's all visually stunning, exhilirating stuff that looks to be building up to an ultimate showdown.

But the actual ending is actually just confusing, messy and makes no sense whatsoever. Even in a film that stopped making sense about ten minutes in, the ending left me wondering what the fuck had just happened. And not in a cool Inception kind of way in which you know that that is what Christopher Nolan intended. More in a "look how clever I am" kind of way. A confusing ending is all well and good, but the difference between Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder is that Nolan understands it's not that it's confusing that makes it clever, but that there is actually some level of sense in the narrative which makes extensive discussion of that confusion possible. Snyder thinks his closest narrative peer at the moment is Nolan, when in fact it is Michael Bay... tons of action-packed spectacle, which is tremendous fun when it's not trying to be anything more than it is.

But, despite these criticisms, the good news is that Sucker Punch isn't at all as bad as reviewers have led you to believe. Everyone who saw the trailer knew that what this movie promised was hot girls not wearing much taking part in over the top visually stunning action set-pieces. That is exactly what it delivered in spades, and anyone who expected anything more were obviously deluding themselves. Zack may have made the mistake of putting every single awesome idea he's ever had into one movie, forcing him to try to be clever in order to tie all of these pieces together to create some semblance of story in there, but he's not guilty of under-achieving when it comes to the action scenes. He may have been better served if he pitched the idea to Ninja Theory (developer of PS3 games like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey To The West) than to Warner Pictures... I'm sure as a game it would have been an incredibly fun, if not entirely original experience. The soundtrack was also a pleasant surprise, featuring Emily Browning's vocals on new takes of songs like Sweet Dreams and Where Is My Mind? (is there anything this girl can't do? I think I may be in love), as well as an incredible cover of The Stooges' Search And Destroy by Skunk Anansie.

SCORE: 6.5/10 - Imagine Japanese "heroic bloodshed" movies like Onechanabra which are basically just films about half naked girls with swords... but add in a $82 million budget and some actual actors, and you get one gorgeous-looking, expensive guilty pleasure that is perfect as brainless entertainment, but is severely flawed when it comes to plot and structure.


If this image alone doesn't make you want to see Sucker Punch, you're either female or there's something wrong with you.