Before I say anything about Sucker Punch, I want to give you some context. I watched this movie mainly because of the review posted below. I generally hold Movie Bob’s reviews in high regard – it rarely happens that one of his recommendations steers me wrong. And he really liked this movie:
I agree with Bob that Sucker Punch does have a quite clear and poignant message. It is not just a jumbled mess of random fetish, fantasy sequences and fan service. It is a quite clever, subversive commentary on some of the current Hollywood obsessions. Think about this:
Every time Baby Doll starts to dance, the action cuts away to a fantasy world in which young women in skimpy schoolgirl uniforms battle Steam Powered Zombie Nazis, dragons, robots and machine gun Samurai. Each of these sequences is an unreal orgy of sexualized violence with airbrushed pinup girls striking sexy poses before and after each swing of their samurai swords. These are clearly male fetish, fantasies made to be ogled rather than watched. So if you went to see this movie mainly because you saw that it will be featuring sexy chicks sword fighting with steam powered undead nazis, what does that say about you? How much different does that make you from the men that are watching Baby Doll in the layer underneath the steam-punk fantasy world in which you gawk at her.
Sucker Punch Poster
This is the aspect of the movie that I find absolutely brilliant. Snyder is a visual artist – all his movies have very strong, very distinctive visual style. He knows how to frame a scene, he knows how to effectively use camera positioning, and he has a great sense of rhythm and timing. He is basically an antithesis of everything that hacks like Michael Bay stand for. And Sucker Punch is his manifesto, his commentary on the shoddy work his contemporaries are doing right now. He delivers a scathing critique of movies such as Transformers 2, by creating something that on the surface would appeal to the same audience.
Snyder wants to attract the people who loved Transformers movies because they could watch Meghan Fox wiggle her tits and ass against the backdrop of explosions. He wants them to get all riled up and excited about samurai sword wielding pinup girls, just so that he pull the rug from underneath them and say: “Look at yourself. Look at what you are doing here. You are Blue. You are the nasty cook! You are the cigar smoking mayor! You came here to see a sexploitation flick, in which we dress girls up in sexy outfits and make them perform for your amusement. Shame on you!” And chances are that half of these people won’t even realize this. They are going to leave the theaters thinking that while the fight scenes were awesome, everything else about the movie was kinda weak.
Sad part is that they will be partly right. Everything else in this movie is kinda weak. Snyder’s biggest weakness seems to be writing convincing dialogs and characterization. We haven’t really seen this in his previous works, because he worked mostly in the realm of adaptation. He already had very strong characters, and very good lines he could put in their mouths. Sucker Punch is his first original work in which he had to create his own cast of characters, and this lack of experience clearly shows in the movie. He tries really hard to breathe some life into his cast of airbrushed pin-up dolls, but he falls short.
Every time the girls open their mouths, their conversations feel contrived and fake. They just don’t feel like real women. It doesn’t help that so much of the movie is spent inside the combat fantasy sequences, that there is preciously little time to flesh out the personalities. There team is composed of five girls, but two (Amber and Blondie) get almost no lines, and no characterization despite participating in all the action sequences. Snyder operates more with character archetypes (adventurous pixie, grounded and responsible older sister etc…) rather than actual characters. And to deliver a full impact, this movie really needed strong, nuanced female characters. Not cardboard cut-outs, not pinup dolls but real flesh and bone women. That’s what Snyder is lacking. That what muddies his message a bit.
It is very interesting movie experiment. It is almost like an extended music video. It looks great, it sounds great. It’s absolutely over the top CGI sequences are absolutely breathtaking (but, once again – high budget movie these days does not have breathtaking visuals), but at the same very clinical, soulless, boring and empty. It is hard to care about the action when it is so highly stylized, and so overdone. Which I believe was exactly the point Snyder was trying to make. So I won’t argue against this artistic choice. These vacuous visual barrages are supposed to be contrasted and juxtaposed against the story of camaraderie between desperate, vulnerable women… And that’s where Snyder drops the ball. He is not off by much, but his evident shortcomings in the realm of plot construction and dialog writing do show. In a high concept movie like this, these flaws are enough to sufficiently muddy the waters and make this movie perfectly average or below average experience.
I’d say it is worth checking out as a rental, but if you miss it, you will survive.