Review: Sucker Punch

     Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself, "Yeah, this is okay, but the stupid plot keeps getting in the way of the action. I don't care about character development, I want to see a bunch of soulless goons get killed by the good guys in flashy stylistic fashion. And to be honest with you, I really don't want the action sequences to move the narrative forward at all either. I want pure action for the sake of action, uninhibited by the traditional adherence to the outdated notions of 'story'". If this is you, then don't worry, Zack Snyder hears you and feels your pain. In fact, he's a made an original movie just to satisfy these demands. It goes by the name of "Sucker Punch".

     Now I'm not sure if the title is meant to ironically humorous, but after exiting the theater at the end of the film I could not think of any more apropos saying than "sucker punch" to describe how I felt. In fact, I would be tempted to consider the whole film an elaborate commentary on the state of the modern action movie in the Hollywood studio system, but then I remembered Snyder is the director of the movies "300" and "The Watchmen", so unless his whole career is to be considered some grand conceptual art piece, I'm afraid I am going to have to take the film at face value. Before the jump then, for any of the lazy readers of this blog who don't take the time to read anything beyond the breaks, I feel compelled to give you a warning right here and now. DON'T SEE THIS MOVIE!
  
      Now if you're still with me, curious as to why the movie is so bad, let's get down to business. The film's wildly ridiculous story takes place inside a Vermont insane asylum. After the death of their mother, Baby Doll (Emily Browning, and hopefully by the character name you get an idea of type of movie we're talking about here) and her sister are the victims of attempted raping by their stepfather. In order to save her younger sister from abuse, Baby Doll attempts to shoot her stepfather, but accidentally ends up killing her younger sister instead. This leads to her commitment to the insane asylum, where an corrupt doctor (John Ham) makes a deal with the stepfather to have Baby Doll lobotomized in a few days. Here's where it gets "trippy" though. Baby Doll begins to imagine that the whole place is not an institution for the mentally ill, but some weird high-end strip club/brothel, where girls are held against their will to perform for local elites and big-whigs.

     This pretend bordello is where we spend most of our time. In this world, Baby Doll concocts an escape with the other girls. She stumbles upon this plan when she is forced to dance, which, with the meekest shoulder shimmy I have every seen in my life, somehow sends everyone to an extreme acid trip. The first imaginary-world-within-imaginary-world action sequence takes her to some Buddhist-like Eastern monastery, where she meets Wise Man (Scott Glen), a shameful rip off of the late David Carradine's Bill character in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series. Here, Wise Man, gives her a list of four things she must get if she is to escape. This leads to a video game like structure, where in order to retrieve the four items, she does her dance (which must spray LCD from her body), spends us into another action sequence that is totally devoid of any meaning to the story, and then repeats the sequence over again.

     The structure might be a little hard to understand unless you have seen the movie (which I don't recommend), but it pretty much serves as an excuse to make elaborate CGI action sequences which are connected to the story by the skinniest of threads. These sequences, each with their own bizarre theme (like fighting undead German soldiers from the First World War), are terribly trite and aesthetically unappealing. The special effects look stupid enough on their own, but with the washed-out color palette that Snyder likes to work with, everything looks like a grey dream of some Soviet peasant. To top all this off, each of these action sequences are set to terrible covers of great songs. Some examples of the songs covered include Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", The Beatle's "Tomorrow Never Knows", and the most painful one as a diehard Pixies fan, "Where is My Mind?". This last one is particularly stomach churning too because, one, the song is already famous for its use at the end of David Fincher's "Fight Club", and two, because it is played as Baby Doll enters the insane asylum, which is about as droll and on the nose as it gets.

     In a year that is going to break the record for the most sequels, remakes, and spin-offs (1/4 of this year's films will fit one of these categories), I really do want to support an original project such as "Sucker Punch", but the thing is, while it technically qualifies as original, truthfully it couldn't be further from the intent of the word. Everything you see is "borrowed" from some other movie, and not with a wink of the eye either. The dialogue in particular is hackneyed and stereo-typical, with Baby Doll's speech towards the end about "going on without me" a verbatim rip-off of every other "go on without me" speech in the history of cinema. Given the prices of movie tickets these days, and given the rough economic times, I consider it a public service announcement to let people know to avoid this film. Unless my theoretical monologue at the beginning of this article describes your feelings on movies, avoid "Sucker Punch" by any means necessary.

Rating: 3/10

Christopher Lominac