Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Scott Glenn and Jon Hamm
Directed By: Zack Snyder
Written By: Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya, based on a story by Zack Snyder
Produced By: Deborah Snyder and Zack Snyder
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 110 minutes
Website: sucker-punch-movie.com
Budget: $82 million
Genre: Action, Science Fiction
Release Date: March 22, 2011
In Hollywood, there comes a time in any A-list director’s career where they’ve paid their dues, produced a few commercial or critical hits, and are suddenly given license to indulge themselves. If you’re Peter Jackson, for instance, you use the clout of your Lord of the Rings smashes to finance your own ultra-expensive, epically long remake of your favorite movie, King Kong. If you’re Zack Snyder, director of 300, Watchmen and the Dawn of the Dead remake, you take the opportunity to indulge anything and everything a 14-year-old version of yourself would have loved and hope to God it all makes sense.
It doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop Snyder from trying with Sucker Punch. The plot involves a young, traumatized girl we later come to know as “Baby Doll” (Emily Browning from A Series of Unfortunate Events). Baby Doll is in trouble, sent to a cartoonishly dreadful 1950s insane asylum by a stepfather whose abuse of Baby and her sister leads to one long, violent night. Looking to get his hands on Baby’s late mother’s fortune, the wicked stepfather is more than willing to lock the girl up and pay an unscrupulous orderly (Oscar Isaac, Robin Hood) to make sure Baby Doll doesn’t survive long enough to answer any police questions. With a scheduled lobotomy looming, Baby Doll falls into the unorthodox care of Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino, Sin City).
From there, Sucker Punch descends into multiple fantasy scenarios, as Baby Doll copes with her treatment by imagining (or is she?) a brothel where her fellow patients are really captive prostitutes and Dr. Gorski merely their tutor in the art of seductive dance. But this version of Baby Doll has her own imaginary place to escape to, and in that reality, she’s an action hero. To go any further describing the layers of fantasy and how they interact with each other would take up the remainder of this review, but rest assured it involves Baby Doll and her fellow patients/prostitutes strutting through fantastical battle scenarios in various kinds of fetish gear. These girls are on a mission, and that mission just happens to include shooting Nazi zombies while wearing thigh-high stockings and making tight leather look comfortable while slaying dragons.
Sucker Punch manages the feat of being both complicated and dirt simple, burying a straightforward plot of escape and revenge in multiple layers of fantasy and delusion. That Baby Doll and her crew of meticulously sexualized teenage girls barely qualify as characters is beside the point. Sucker Punch is purely visual, and Browning’s perma-pout and listless, swaying “dancing” don’t make the film any less an endless series of retina-scorching CG action sequences. The girls (among them, Limitless’s Abbie Cornish and High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens) aren’t the performers here, the effects are. And it is an impressive display, a virtual showcase of modern visual effects – robots, planes, trains, gunfire, swords, ninjas – all of which are there for cute girls to fight through, video game-style.
Snyder, a former commercial and music video director, has long been a unique visual stylist, never known for a soft touch on his storytelling. Here, acting as co-writer, director, and producer, Snyder is allowed to indulge all the best and worst aspects of his directorial style, and the result is a mixed collection of soggy melodrama and kick-ass, beautifully photographed action. For a certain type of viewer, this will be enough; doubtless the movie will have a strong following on home video and inspire years of vaguely inappropriate Halloween costumes.
For another, more demanding viewer, the cardboard characters and shaky plot mechanics will trump even the sight of a girl in a mechanized robot suit shooting zephyrs out of the sky. With his 300 and Watchmen cinematographer, Larry Fong, making it all look so gorgeous, it’s hard to argue with the worst of Zack Snyder when so much of the best of Zack Snyder is on display, but the tenuousness of anything and everything outside its visual palate sinks much of the joy and wonder of Sucker Punch. Nonetheless, somewhere, 14-year-old Snyder is high-fiving the 40-something Snyder who was able to make all this happen.
2 Stars
