Sucker Punch Review

• 30th Mar 2011

Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch begins with a velvet curtain being drawn back from a stage. It is his caveat – the real world has no place in this film – one that should be heeded by anyone about to embark on the two hour journey filled with beautiful girls, samurai swords, dragons and multi-layered realities. Individually, we have seen all these elements before and in no way should we be hopeful that there will be any real substance to the narrative. Snyder is concerned with visual impact rather than emotional depth and as long as you are willing to suspend a good portion of your critical faculty, it is relatively easy to appreciate SP as something that just looks fucking cool.

SP follows Emily Browning’s Baby Doll, a young woman forcibly committed to a mental institution by her evil step-father. Baby Doll’s back-story is told in full Snyder-vision; silent, slow-motion action that efficiently and (of course) stylishly depicts her step-father’s viciousness and her subsequent internment in the asylum. If you don’t appreciate this opening sequence, all gothic shading and storm-battered melodrama, it is doubtful that the rest of the movie will be to your liking. It could very easily be a music video for some emo-pop-rock band. I, however, genuinely love his striking visual flamboyance, which is just as well, because I am afraid to say that SP has little else to recommend it. The film follows Baby Doll’s plan to escape the asylum and the barbaric procedure with which she is threatened. She thus embarks on a series of bizarre battles, each of which is anchored in a brothel reality ‘level’, in which she must complete a set of tasks that will eventually procure her freedom.

The institution from which Baby Doll must escape fulfils all the horror asylum archetypes one could wish for – eerie, threatening and grimy – and comes complete with creepy staff and corrupt orderlies. The shady head orderly (and menacing brothel owner in the burlesque level of the film), Oscar Isaac’s Blue, is quickly revealed as the chief villain and from whom all the girls are trying to escape. Baby Doll is not alone in Lennox House; she joins a group of female inmates, all of a similar age, physical appeal and neatly slotting into a set of stereotypes. As we reality-hop from the institution to the brothel, they are the dancer-prostitutes that Baby Doll is to become a member of. These girls, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung), help Baby Doll to complete her missions, overcoming their predictable distrust and fear of reprisals. They are a mixed bunch in terms of acting ability, with Cornish coming off worst of the bunch with her stilted delivery and penchant for heavy breathing.

Of course, the cast’s performances are not aided by some truly dire scripting and a rather dubious story arc. Here’s where Snyder’s weakness is revealed. Disappointingly, wince-inducing, clunky dialogue hampers the film and makes some of it hard work. Unlike his two most accomplished films (Dawn of the Dead and adaptation of the seminal graphic novel Watchmen), Snyder took on writing duties for SP and let’s hope he doesn’t try it again. His relatively impressive and ambitious vision is tethered to nothing, wispy clouds of a narrative that have no real reason and characters that have no real character. Instead of a graphic glimpse of a damaged heroine and the face of the perversion and abuse of power, we have a glassy-eyed doll, vacant and trembling. Each of the blisteringly loud and violent fight scenes have a relatively simple set-up, much a like a video game level that must be completed, but each one fashioned with such perfect awareness of how to make it look as cool as possible. From synchronized stylized landings as the girls leap from helicopters, to Hudgens wielding a hatchet against re-animated corpses. The battles are enormously enjoyable and I grinned my way through them. However, as soon as we are dragged back from the elaborate fight-scenes that pit steam-powered zombie Nazis against manga-hotties with katanas, things tend to fall apart slightly.

Despite the warning not to take things at all seriously in terms of reality, it was still slightly disappointing that, notwithstanding the far-fetched nature of the action, there was still almost no actual threat. This is not as detrimental to the film as one might think, as it is proven on several occasions that the real threat is in the world closer to home – it is in the brothel world and real world in the asylum that the girls should fear for their lives. This threat is almost entirely embodied in Blue, who is genuinely disquieting. The final scene in the institution, despite the undeniably strange outcome of the film, is one of the best portions of the film, as Blue’s carefully constructed world of corruption and abuse crumbles around him.

SP indisputably lacks nothing in terms of style and it is apparent that Snyder has crammed as many cool things into one film as he possibly can, unfortunately to the film’s detriment. Loud, showy and very bold, SP won’t be to everyone’s taste and if only someone with a more solid writing capability had taken on that portion of the work, we may have been blessed with a more rounded film. Instead, somewhat like a rollercoaster with too much flat track, while the upside-down loops are exciting enough to entertain, one can’t help but be a little frustrated.

Hannah Turner