Movie Review: Sucker Punch

Watchmen (2009) was a deeply flawed film. Not least because director Zach Snyder, who had shown himself to be an artist when it came to gripping, and crucially fun, action scenes with the stonking Dawn of the Dead remake (2004) and shouty slow-motion-swordfight-porn 300 (2007), lost all directorial sensibilities and allowed his reverence of the source material to smother the style through which he had gained success. Watchmen lacked Zach Snyder, and suffered for it. More Zach Snyder was what we wanted, so Sucker Punch was what we got: possibly one of the most head-achingly stupid mainstream blockbuster to come out in the past 20 years.

Baby Doll (Emily Browning), after being framed for her sister’s murder and cast aside so her greedy step father can inherit her deceased parent’s wealth, is sent to an insane asylum apparently only inhabited by mind-bogglingly pretty girls. As she begins to plan her escape, she finds herself falling into strange and fantastical worlds of zombie soldiers, dragons and robots, as she and her other unbelievably beautiful friends battle to find their freedom.

The dream sequences carry no emotional weight.

If that sounds simple enough, it isn’t. One of the film’s myriad problems is its complete lack of narrative flow. The removal of needless plot exposition is a necessity, but Zach Snyder seems to explain nothing: not until the final, and screamingly unsatisfying, last five or ten minutes do we find out what is really going on. It is unclear as to whether or not the last moments are a plot twist, the tone seems to suggest so; however anybody with half a brain would be able to see exactly what is going on from the start, and as such the middle section of the film carries almost no weight at all. 

Exploitation at 12A. The result: all bark and no bite.

The fact is that all of the Sucker Punch’s stupidities could be forgotten, all of its silliness forgiven, if it had merely had faith in itself. Trite this phrase may be; but one thing that fiction over the decades has taught us is that if the author can make you believe their tale, however fantastical it is, it is ultimately a strong piece of storytelling. Sucker Punch’s confidence neither lies in the real world asylum, too briefly shown to be worth caring about, or its fantasies. The film’s strengths lie in Zach Snyder’s ability to direct action; a World War One inspired scene is particularly well-imagined: but the scenes carry no weight because they’re only in Baby Doll’s head. Neo could die in the Matrix (1999) and that’s why you cared; you knew Sam from Brazil (1985) well enough in the real world to be worried that the fantasies that take him over could overwhelm him: but none of these elements are in Sucker Punch. The fantasies are essentially dreams, so you don’t care, and the real world is something that can’t be controlled so you don’t care about that either. Zach Snyder either needs to have faith in his fantasy, or not dilute his reality, because the upshot is a messy, plotless videogame without the pleasure of interactivity. The pretty girls only stamping home the fact that this is an exploitation movie without the teeth, a two hour music video with some competent action scenes but no cerebral content.