Review: Sucker Punch

“Imagination” is always the buzzword that fanboys and critics alike use when discussing the films of Zack Snyder, who seems to be garnering the reputation of 21st Century Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg despite the fact that he only has two good movies under his belt. Ironically, both movies, Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen, were adaptations of existing works and Snyder’s deviations (the fast zombies in the former and the omissions in the latter) were largely greeted with mixed reviews. Sucker Punch is Snyder’s first original screenplay and, while full of things you’ve never seen before (robotic World War I soldiers, for instance), it thoroughly debunks the notion that the filmmaker is imaginative. At its core, this is a simpleton movie made in the video game tradition, with very little story, incoherent action scenes, and lots of empty style. Sure, Snyder knows his way around a camera, but so does Michael Bay, who receives far more flack because his films are more transparently infantile. Sucker Punch is only imaginative in the sense that it feels like the paranoid delusion of a stoner with three screens in front of him: one for playing Halo, another for watching Inception, and the last for browsing Internet porn.

While Sucker Punch may live up to the bottom-feeder standards of Halo and Internet porn, it goes without saying that it doesn’t even enter the realm of Inception. Nonetheless, if the two movies had a bigger gap between their releases, I would likely be accusing Snyder of ripping off the “dream within a dream” concept of fellow WB director Christopher Nolan. This structure is all there is to the narrative of Sucker Punch… Protagonist Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is wrongfully committed to an asylum where she will soon be lobotomized, causing her to escape into a dreamworld where she and her fellow inmates (Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, and Jamie Chung) are actually exotic dancers in a brothel. There, they seek to escape and, acquiring the tools necessary to do so, they fight epic fantasy battles. Such a description makes the stupid movie sound a lot more complicated than it is. Once you get past the somewhat unorthodox structure, however, there is no depth to be found. The scenes in the brothel function as cheap eroticism, but they don’t even have the follow-through to be primitively titillating. Sucker Punch sentences the viewer to a painful case of blue-balls, for Baby Doll’s dancing is used as the trigger for the battle dream sequences to be initiated. In other words, we never get to actually see her perform her gratuitous dance; the moment she begins to sway, we enter fantasyland.

Said battle sequences surpass those in the recent Battle: Los Angeles to become the worst in recent memory. Like that film’s director, Jonathan Liebesman, Snyder has zero sense of how to properly assemble an action scene and thus reverts to the plebeian instinct to overwhelm the viewer with as many visual tricks as possible. The result is a visual plane that is complicated, but not immersive; each action scene feels exactly the same as the last. (No, it really doesn’t matter whether the characters are fighting the aforementioned WWI robots or they are disarming a bomb on a train on one of Saturn’s moons.) Most of the time, the camera is so frantic and the cuts so rapid, you can’t tell what is going on. As I also said of Battle: Los Angeles, watching this movie is just like watching a friend play a video game without a controller of your own, because, beyond running and shooting, there is nothing to it. No character development, no plot revelations — just a simple mission to find five objects (a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a secret) to escape fate. In fact, this very design–one “level” per object–makes the ordeal feel exactly like a video game. Alas, the only people who may potentially be entertained are teenage boys, and even they will probably be alienated by the film’s pseudo-artsy pretense.

Given the financial success he has had in the modern action genre, and how deft he is in other aspects of filmmaking (pacing, the fusion of image and sound, etc), it is downright perplexing how poor Snyder is at constructing individual action scenes. In fact, his reputation as a strong action director is even falser than the aforementioned myth that he is especially imaginative. Watchmen is Snyder’s only film that shows true competence in the action arena, and this is mostly because the scenes were directly adapted from the panes of the graphic novel (de facto storyboards). Joining the director’s atrocious 300 and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Sucker Punch stands an utterly incompetent picture, mainly because it is merely a linkage of such ugly action scenes. Come to think of it, Snyder really only did one thing right in making the Sucker Punch: casting up-and-comer Emily Browning, whose screen-presence is downright magnetic. Then again, as a devout fan of Browning’s since she appeared as a teenager in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, perhaps I should be crushed that she has been wasted on such a vacant character and film. You know you have a bad movie on your hands when not even Browning’s attractive physique in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit is enough to interest the viewer.

* * *

Sucker Punch (2011, USA). Produced by Wesley Coller, Christopher DeFaria, John Jashni, Jim Rowe, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, and Thomas Tull. Directed by Zack Snyder. Written for the screen by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya. Story by Zack Snyder. Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, and Scott Glenn. Distributed by Warner Bros. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 110 minutes.