There’s something gloriously unhinged about Sucker Punch. Zack Snyder’s tale of mental asylums, nightclubs, fantasies, and general sexiness is utterly divorced from reality. Like Alice in Wonderland or Moulin Rouge, Sucker Punch has its own set of rules, and Snyder makes no apologies or accommodations. You can get on board or not, but you’re stuck in Snyder’s movie.
And there are times when Snyder makes you forget the real world. He’s an impressive visual stylist – the History of Superheroes montage in Watchmen was beautiful – and he seems to have devoted his entire career to making things look as cool as possible. The opening of Sucker Punch features a silent, fairy tale horror story set to a haunting cover of Sweet Dreams, and there’s almost no dialogue for the first five or ten minutes. Some of the fantasy sequences are marvels of imagination and special effects, particularly a raid on a WWI German bunker defended by zombie soldiers. There are plenty of “oooooh!” moments.
But just because you’re telling a story about dreams and fantasy doesn’t mean you can completely abandon logic, character, and basic human decency. To wit:
Pretend you’re a young girl. (You’re actually 20, but dress like a 12-year-old beauty pageant contestant.) Your mother has just died. Your stepfather is an awful man, but that’s okay because your mother left you and your sister all her money. Except it’s not okay, because your stepfather, who is an awful man, tries to rape you and your younger sister. Then you end up in a 1920s-era mental asylum where your awful stepfather is planning to have you lobotomized.
It’s natural you’d try to escape. If you couldn’t physically escape, perhaps you’d concoct an elaborate fantasy as a coping mechanism, change your view of the world into something less threatening and more manageable. In this reality, you’d be… a prostitute? An indentured servant at a burlesque house ruled over by a mobster who uses violence and threats of rape to keep his women in line.
Yes, being a prostitute is better than having a spike hammered into your brain. But as far as fantasies go, it needs work. It’s also a tiny bit redundant, since Baby Doll – yes that is actually the character’s name – has the ability to hypnotize people while she’s dancing. (We never see the actual dancing, but it’s probably safe to say it’s very sexy.) At this point, we retreat into yet another fantasy world – this time full of zombies, dragons, robots, and giant samurai. She meets a wise man in her fantasy who tells her how to escape, and attempts to steal simple items in the asylum/brothel are carried out in elaborate fantasy action sequences.
It’s easy to see what Snyder was trying to do: Powerless young women trapped in a horrible situation find a way to empower themselves and escape.
Unfortunately, Sucker Punch appears to have based its ideas about female empowerment from bad 1990s comic books. The girls remain sexy at all times, strutting into battle scenes in short skirts and fishnets. While there’s probably something to be said for taking ownership of their sexuality, the juxtaposition of sexy girls fighting – often in slow-motion – and a “reality” filled with dehumanization and threats of sexual violence leaves your eyes feeling dirty. Throw in Baby Doll’s pigtailed, pubescent appearance, and things start to get icky.
(This isn’t the first time Snyder has confused character with sexiness. In 300, he gave Queen Gorgo a more prominent role than she had in the book, but her contribution to the plot was to have sex for Sparta. It’s tough to take a female Frank Miller character and make her even more sexual, but Snyder plunged ahead anyway. It’s enough to make me worry for Amy Adams and Lois Lane in his upcoming Superman reboot.)
And what story of female liberation would be complete without an old man leading the way? The Wise Man seems more of an inspirational figure in his first appearance, but he quickly assumes a leadership role in Baby Doll’s fantasies, giving orders and detailing the girls’ objectives. While Baby Doll could certainly use some guidance, wasn’t it at all possible to find a wise woman to guide her? For a movie obsessed with symbolism and metaphor, Sucker Punch misses the point with alarming frequency.
It might help if there was something more to the characters than short skirts and samurai swords, but there’s almost nothing under the surface. The girls want to escape from the whorehouse/sanitarium. Sometimes they’re scared. One girl is really enthusiastic about it, another is reluctant. Two of the cast members are completely disposable (hint: neither one is blonde). The bulk of Emily Browning’s performance as Baby Doll consists of looking scared and/or sad, though she does deserve credit for wearing the biggest fake eyelashes since Tammy Faye Baker. Browning is silent for almost the first half hour of the film, and I started to wonder if she was going to be a mute heroine. Alas, she soon starts talking, and everything goes downhill from there. Browning takes Snyder’s wafer-thin character and gives back a performance lacking any passion, nuance, or emotion.
I’d even settle for some actresses that look like they know what they’re doing with a weapon. The cast of Sucker Punch generally resembles a Victoria’s Secret Hallowe’en photoshoot, doing lots of posing and running about without ever looking the slightest bit threatening. You don’t have to go to the extreme of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2; Uma Thurman was perfectly deadly and sexy in Kill Bill. At the lower end of the Female Action Star spectrum, even Milla Jovovich started to look credible in Resident Evil.
While Snyder’s visual innovation keeps things moving for the first half of the film, it soon wears thin. The first few fantasy sequences are exhilarating – Baby Doll vs. Giant Robot Samurai, and the aforementioned WWI zombie battle – but Snyder’s recurring tricks become irritating. The fight scenes are fast and furious, but punctuated with excessive slow-motion when anything cool or serious happens. If you enjoy watching bullets glide slowly through the air and spent shells float gently to the ground, and somehow didn’t get enough of that sort of thing while watching The Matrix, then Sucker Punch may excite you. But everyone else will want to remind Snyder that slow-motion is not a substitute for clarity, and point out that things look increasingly less cool when you’ve seen them 15 times in the past 45 minutes.
On first inspection, it’s easy to lump Sucker Punch into the pretty-but-dumb category of action movies. There are no characters, no acting, and no script to speak of, and the plot barely holds up to the most casual examination. On the other hand, everything looks and sounds really cool, and there’s a level of creativity that’s rarely seen in Hollywood films. If you have low no expectations of drama and screenwriting and want to turn your brain off and ooh and aaah at explosions and people getting shot in the head, Sucker Punch might be for you.
But it’s worse than that. If Sucker Punch were merely stupid, it might have been enjoyable and forgettable. Unlike many movies that have nothing to say, it says all the wrong things, and says them very badly. It wants to be about escaping from reality and female empowerment, but doesn’t understand how either of those things work. It puts young women in an environment where they’re treated as sexual commodities, but they never escape objectification by the director and his audience. It starts with the threat of rape, and then proceeds to infantilize and sexualize its main character to extremes. It rightly demonizes men who treat women like sexual property, but lingers over its helplessly suffering characters like the creepiest voyeur. And the only way to escape the sadistic world of Sucker Punch is with the help of a wise man – because otherwise, these simple girls wouldn’t stand a chance.
Sucker Punch is a very pretty movie. But it’s a very stupid one, made by a director who doesn’t seem to realize the lines he’s crossed. You might be able to turn your brain off and enjoy it, but it’s much better to leave your brain on and avoid it entirely.