(Long Island, N.Y.) Sucker Punch: remove the last seven letters from the title of this movie and you’ll have my opinion of it. Yes, Zack Snyder, noted director of such hits as 300 and Watchmen, has created the ultimate plot-less, all style/no substance movie populated with vapid characters who possess zero personality or development. You care about nothing at all while watching it. Nothing.
In fact, Sucker Punch is everything that is wrong with modern movies. It actually depressed me more than anything else, because the trailers indicated a flick that would, at the very least, be fun on a base level; after all, it seemed to be throwing everything an action/fantasy geek could ever want into the mix. But the end result…ugh. Suffice it to say that if Emily Browning hadn’t been in it, it would have been unbearable to sit through. It still almost was.
To say the plot is threadbare is like saying that Uwe Boll is the next Ed Wood; we’re simply stating the obvious, folks. But hey, let’s recap it anyway: a girl named “Baby Doll” (Emily Browning) accidentally shoots her sister while trying to stop her Evil Stepfather from molesting them. Oops! So, Evil Stepfather uses this fact to have Baby Doll committed to an insane asylum, greasing the palm of an Evil Orderly named Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) to fake the signature of the asylum’s lead therapist to get her lobotomized. This way, Evil Stepfather’s in the clear! What a cad.
Anyway, Baby Doll’s got five days before the doctor arrives to nip the tip of her frontal lobe, so she hatches a plan to escape with four other inmates: Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). But, you see, here’s where Sucker Punch’s gimmick kicks in: poor little Baby Doll can’t take the reality of her situation, so she retreats into a fantasy world where she envisions the asylum as a nightclub/brothel and her and her fellow loonies as prostitutes. Um, I guess that’s an improvement…?
But every time something happens in THIS reality that Baby Doll can’t cope with, like someone asking her to dance all sexy-like, she retreats into yet ANOTHER fantasy world, one stuffed to the rafters with every Sci-Fi/Anime/Action/Fantasy movie cliché you can imagine. Oh, and while there she and her friends are suddenly wearing skimpy little outfits for no real reason (I didn’t mind that so much). It’s here that Baby Doll’s escape plan unfolds: she’s instructed by a Wise Man (Scott Glenn) that, to make good her escape, she must go on a fetch quest: she needs to collect things like a knife, fire, a map, and so on.
Each quest takes place in a different realm, like a Japan World populated with giant samurai warriors armed with Gatling guns, a World of Warcraft world with fire-breathing dragons, a Nazi World with steam-powered S.S. officers, and a Train World where you have to fight T-1000’s. Each fantastical “quest” equates to Baby Doll’s efforts to steal some mundane everyday object in the real world.
However, the doctor’s on his way and Baby Doll’s time is running out. Can she and her friends navigate her twisted sense of reality and make good their escape in time?
I can’t remember the last time a movie had so little story, such bad dialogue, or characters so thin and undeveloped. Honestly, you won’t leave the theater knowing any more about the cast of Sucker Punch then when you walked in. The film just felt like an excuse to create the ultimate geek fantasy: girls in short skirts fighting all manner of creatures and robots and zombies with swords and guns and powered suits of armor, all while playing it off as Baby Doll’s “coping mechanism.” Even if it were true, the movie takes place in the 1950’s; why would a child of that era be daydreaming about every Anime trick in the book when it wasn’t even invented yet?
Otherwise, the film basically has no story. None. Zip. Nada. It’s really amazing: girl in nut farm steals trinkets to try and escape while imagining herself as Sailor Moon. That’s it. Oh, and let’s not forget the overuse of tired pop songs in the soundtrack, or the fact that 70% of the movie is basically a music video. More like 80%, actually.
Even from a pure action standpoint, Sucker Punch fails; the pacing between the “brothel” reality and the “fantasy” reality is so off that it really destroys the pacing of the movie as a whole. The visuals are sharp, yeah, but 90% of the time you’re painfully aware that the actors are standing in front of a green screen, not to mention the fact that the characters can take superhuman amounts of punishment with nary a scratch while in the “fantasy” world, removing any sense of danger from their battles.
Oh, and each time the super-annoying Scott Glenn laid out the girls’ mission objectives, it felt like it was the set-up for a video-game level, which is all this stupid movie really was. One big video-game.
Oh, and I love the people who are trying to say that Snyder’s use of half-naked butt-kicking chicks is actually supposed to be a deep statement AGAINST half-naked butt-kicking chicks, i.e. Hollywood’s objectification of women. Yeah, right. And even if it’s true, the end result is exactly the same: Snyder’s movie contains no actual social commentary on the matter…it’s just about half-naked butt-kicking chicks, which, honestly, is the only thing that kept me watching. If I wasn’t very much a heterosexual, this movie would have been almost unwatchable.
Sucker Punch takes everything that’s ruining modern movies – bad plots, lame, forgettable characters, flash over depth – and amplifies it by 100. Steer clear, lest we make Hollywood think we want more of this garbage.
