Introduction
When the trailers for Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch first hit theaters/the Internet, it became one of this year's most anticipated movies, getting more interest than many of the upcoming Marvel properties and DC's Green Lantern. Hot chicks in the 1950s/60s (around the time of Girl, Interrupted) going on crazy adventures in a dilapidated mental hospital (compared by some to Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor) contrasted against outlandish and brightly colored dream sequences developed by a very visually adept director (The Wizard of Oz comparisons are easy). People didn't really expect art, but many expected a good time. A non-comic book property that would appeal to fanboys, maybe some sort of female empowerment tale that would also appeal to fangirls. Yes, the T+A+E(xplosions) were there, but there was a near universal hope and expectation of something greater. With the team of rebel girls concept, I was personally expecting something with elements of 1996’s The Craft.
When people finally saw Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch- well, let's just say the 300 and Watchmen (which I maintain is the best comic book movie ever made) filmmaker probably thanked God he already signed the deal to direct the upcoming Superman reboot. Oddly enough, Sucker Punch is in many ways like Superman Returns. An epic scope, a respected and proven director, seemingly interesting source material, and so many things seemed to click- that is until we saw the movie.
Both films are mistake upon mistake upon mistake. Dialogue, characters, plots, themes-everything went wrong. These aren't movies you dislike. These are movies you nitpick, these are movies you passionately discuss with people who hate them just as much as you do to just so you can cover every base of what failed.
Unlike Superman Returns, however, it's difficult to imagine any defenders of Sucker Punch. To put another way, more people probably liked Superman Returns, and at least Sucker Punch seemed to take the stance that rape is bad.
What Went Wrong?
Smarter people than myself have written tomes about the “hero's journey.” The centerpiece to most fiction, the character arc is essential to a story. The journey doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to lead to a happy ending, and the audience does not necessarily have to identify with the “hero” - but there has to be something. Sucker Punch presents the bizarre situation where there is no hero's journey. And I don't mean a bad hero's journey or a poorly thought out one, but I mean no hero's journey at all. In fact, this movie takes it to an entirely different realm where the time between the first ~20 minutes (after we enter the brothel reality) and the last ~5 minutes (after Baby Doll gets lobotomized) is totally irrelevant.
Description
I guess I should explain the film at this point in the review. Extensive spoilers. Feel free to skip it.
Like Inception, the film is split into three realities. Reality 1 involves Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a young girl forcibly committed to a mental hospital by her step-father. This occurs after he discovers Baby Doll's mother, whose death kicks off the movie, left her entire inheritance to her two children in her will. Angry, the stepfather tries to rape Baby Doll before trying to molest Baby Doll's younger sister. Baby Doll then attempts to shoot him, accidentally killing her sister in the process. I know I'm making it sound bland, but it actually is by far the best part of the film, which probably sounds like a backhanded compliment but it shouldn't. The sequence was atmospheric, chilling, and an excellent introduction to a film that didn't even try to live up to it.
The hospital is run by Carla Gugino's Dr. Vera Gorsky, a psychiatrist who seems to care about her patients and utilizes alternative forms of therapy, such as dance. Baby Doll's stepfather bribes an orderly named Blue (played by Oscar Isaac and sounding like Action’s Jay Mohr) to have her lobotomized in five days.
Then the hospital becomes a brothel where Baby Doll meets four other patients Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung). Blue becomes a pimp and Gorsky becomes a dance instructor/Madame that acts and sounds like Bart's ballet instructor in that episode of The Simpsons where Homer drives the limo with Mel Brooks.
The only difference between Real Reality (Reality 1) and Brothel Reality (Reality 2) is that the sets kind of changed. There’s no noticeable change in filming style, camera movements, coloring, etc.; it’s still dark and dim and lifeless. I admit originally thinking that the mental hospital was just a front for a whorehouse and that the “show” at the beginning was so the people admitting the patients didn't think “oh wait, I’m sending my disturbed teenaged daughter to a whorehouse. I am probably entitled to a percentage of her whore fees.”
At this point, the film doesn’t (or if it does, it’s very rare and negligible at best) return to Reality 1 until the very end. This leads to a question asked by many viewers: “Why is a brothel (and forced sexual servitude) better than a mental institution?” It’s a query that implicates a lot of darkness but it can be answered, albeit not by the scenes in this movie.
Then, Baby Doll has to dance (to make her lucrative to potential Johns) and her “dance” is so ridiculously sexy that it puts everyone into a hypnotic trance. During her dances, she enters the dream worlds (Reality 3) that make up most of the trailers where she's fighting Germans, dragons, robots, and other zany stuff. Also in Reality 3, the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) briefs them on every mission.
In Reality 2, the dance is meant to distract guards so her fellow inmates can get the objects they need to escape (map, fire, key, knife, and a question mark). The bulk of the movie is then made up of ‘determine object dance/action sequence steal object end dance’, and it very redundant. Nevertheless, I will go into depth about it later.
Long story short, Rocket gets stabbed by a chef, Blondie and Amber get shot by Blue, Baby Doll stabs Blue, and Sweat Pea escapes as Baby Doll lets herself be caught. All of this takes place in Reality 2. As for Reality 1?
We cut back to Reality 1 as Baby Doll is getting lobotomized. Dr. G. calls her a handful because she helped a patient escape, and Dr. G finds out that Blue forged her name on the lobotomy papers, which she probably should have realized earlier but whatever. Blue (who was, in fact, recently stabbed) gets arrested, Sweet Pea (in Reality 2 presumably) gets on a bus driven by Scott Glenn as the Wise Man, and a closing narration from Dr. G. tells us to believe in ourselves, fight for our future, and all that hogwash.
What Went Wrong? (redux)
Sucker Punch is one of those movies that attempts to force weight into its hollowness by throwing out random terms and potential themes in hopes that at least one will connect with the audience. Ideas like guardian angels appearing in random guises throughout one's life, the question of “whose story is this,” and fighting for reality are casually used but never truly explored. The film even uses the “narrator telling the audience to believe in themselves over a black screen at the end” trick, which also found favor in this year's lackluster The Adjustment Bureau (another disappointing Philip K. Dick adaptation), which was also about fighting for one’s future/reality/free will/whatever.
None of these thematic claims make any sense within the context of the film. For example, at the end of the film, Baby Doll helps Sweet Pea escape by sacrificing herself after realizing that “this is her [Sweet Pea's] story.” But is it?
The way the film is set up, without allowing us to have any significant Reality 1 moments with any of the characters (including Baby Doll, opening sequence aside), the most likely candidate for whose story the film is about is Dr. G. At the beginning of the movie, Dr. G. is presented as a psychiatrist who cares for her patients. At the end of the movie, she realizes that one of the orderlies is forging her signature and getting patients lobotomized for some quick cash. That is the most complete story for anyone in the film.
Apropos of nothing, Abbie Cornish starred in this year’s surprisingly enjoyable Limitless.
I just realized that Sweet Pea and Sucker Punch have the same initials. Maybe it really was her story.
But what about Sweet Pea’s escape? Well, do we know if Sweet Pea escaped? All we know, according to Dr. G., is that Baby Doll helped a patient escape. It could have been any one of a dozen patients, including the “dead” Rocket, Amber, or Blondie because we do not know if any of those three actually died. It's doubtful considering how nonchalant Dr. G. was during the lobotomy sequence. You'd think if one of her patients died, let alone three of them, a couple of days earlier she'd show some sort of emotion about it. At least there should be police investigating several brutal murders the day before. Or, when Dr. G.'s discussing how Baby Doll was such a handful that she helped one patient escape, she'd throw in “and killed one (or two or three) others.” Of course, she also didn't mention that Baby Doll stabbed an orderly, so who knows?
Fighting for one’s reality, the most over used motif in the film, also doesn’t work in Sweet Pea case. The one who “escaped” spent most of the movie bitching and moaning about the escape plan and barely did any “fighting.”
The Fantasy Sequences
Yes, they looked (mostly) great and Zack Snyder has a distinctive visual eye but, as this film proved, so what? By the dragon sequence, I was already bored and half-annoyed because there were no stakes in Reality 3 and, when you accept that Reality 2 is similarly fake, no stakes there either. But with dream sequences, you don't really expect anyone to die, which is why in most films dreams symbolize something. Anything. This film had perfect openings to explore different avenues of Baby Doll's psyche as theoretically these sequences represented therapy sessions, but Snyder didn’t even seem to attempt to try. Hell, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors did it better.
When Baby Doll enters her first fantasy world, she receives her weapons (a sword and gun representing nothing other than chicks with swords and guns are hot) from Scott Glenn and fights giant samurai men (like in Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil) with machine guns (unlike in Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil). Do these Samurai men represent anything? I don't know. Her home didn't seem to have any Japanese mementos. Could her stepfather have fought in the Pacific? Maybe. Could the Samurai men have represented something? Definitely. Her step father. The orderly. Other bits of evil sprinkled throughout the film. For a film that had the makings of a female empowerment tale, destroying giant men could have been a great first step down that path. But it wasn’t.
The second fantasy world involves a quest for a map. While Reality 2 Sweet Pea gets the map of the hospital in Reality 2, Reality 3 Baby Doll brings her own version of Sweet Pea and the other gals on a quest in World War 1 to get a map. (No, the Reality 3 and Reality 2 sequences never match up in any way.) I am a fan of World War 1. Well, fan is an odd word. I personally find World War 1 the most fascinating war. A lot of great art came from the experiences of The Great War: All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnny Got His Gun, The Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, Black Adder Goes Fourth (you think I joke but that final episode is chilling), so a tripped out take on that war was actually something that could have been unique.
But it doesn’t fit. See, for a teenage girl in the late 1950s/early 1960s, World War 2 wouldn't merely be more recent, it would very well be something she witnessed. And while I would love to see more work about World War 1 (or, as in this case, World War 1 by way of Castle Wolfenstein), this should not have been the film.
Fantasy world three concerns getting fire to cause a distraction*. Reality 2 had Amber seducing an evil naughty mayor to get his lighter while Baby Doll did whatever the hell she does. Reality 3 had the gang fighting dragons to get crystals that would ignite a flame. To get the crystals, Baby Doll slays a baby dragon then must slay its mother. Decent enough concept, except the movie began with the death of Baby Doll's sister and mother. The parallels aren't just easy, they're ridiculously blatant. Not picking up on them (or, probably more accurately, not doing anything with them) requires amazing skill.
* In Reality 2, getting the flame is the difficult task despite one of them working in the asylum kitchen, which probably requires matches to light the stove. Anyway, the distraction occurs when Baby Doll and Sweet Pea light a Molotov cocktail and burn a room. Getting the flammable liquid requires literally no effort whatsoever.
The final fantasy world revolved around obtaining a knife. In Reality 2, Baby Doll sought to get a knife from the kitchen by seducing a chef with her dancing. In Reality 3, the gang is on a high speed train with a bomb about to explode a major city while fighting robots. For whatever reason, I thought about Heavy Metal during this portion, but that's neither here nor there.
The 1940s and 50s were chock-full of classic science fiction/alien films with a distinctive visual style, many of them focusing on Earth’s threat of annihilation as an allegory for the Cold War. Films like The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Thing From Another World, When Worlds Collide, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as B-movies and serials like Attack of The The Eye Creatures, Teenagers from Outer Space, and Buck Rogers probably would have found an audience in Baby Doll. So her fantasizing a future with the sheen of a 2011 film, I found kind of disappointing. I spent more time wondering if Baby Doll was prescient than enjoying her escape from the hell that was her life.
It is also during this sequence that Reality 2 Rocket gets stabbed (Reality 3 Rocket martyrs herself with the bomb) when Reality 2 Baby Doll stops dancing. But Reality 2 Baby Doll keeps dancing after realizing that Reality 2 Rocket was stabbed, which removes emotional impact by forcing you to wonder a) how close to Reality 1 Reality 2 is or b) maybe Baby Doll really is just nuts.
Like I mentioned above, because all this is happening in Reality 2 Baby Doll's mind, nothing really happens or can really happen to the characters. When I first saw the trailers, I thought these moments would be closer to some sort of mass hallucination the characters engage in while on their quest for the object with the enemies some exaggerated-but-“real” threat. Or some sort of delusion from one of the characters putting their bland lives in an over-the-top situation but still involving the Reality 1 characters. After all, if the Reality 1 characters were all participating in Reality 3, then we might get some character development. I mean, what's more typical in a war movie than characters bonding during the battle? And in this movie we had four battles. As the movie stands now, not even the Reality 2 characters are in Reality 3. .
Also disappointing is that we never got to see the items used together. We never got the World War 1 map mixed with the dragon fire crystals, but I digress...
Other Nitpicks
There are a lot of other things to bitch about with the movie. The dialogue is horrendous and many scenes, especially Reality 3 scenes, would have been better served had it been mostly silent except for Scott Glenn's exposition and occasional grunts. Even little sentences like “Get down!” could have been removed to create a better effect. Similarly, maybe Baby Doll should have spoke as little as possible, as she was completely silent for most of the first part of the film. Her saying random nothings lessened the allure of the character.
Why was Amber the pilot in every fantasy? Did they ever show her to have any interest in aviation?
Why did they all wear the same outfits in every Reality 3 sequence?
Summing Up
Sucker Punch is not just a catastrophe, but a startling one, which makes it an interesting one. For a movie set in a mental hospital, it's ironically beyond analysis. It's empty to a fault, pointless without having a quirkiness or cleverness to fall back on. Nevertheless, the mistakes it made, everything it did wrong (and it did everything wrong), makes for a fun discussion.
While I'm sure that there are people who enjoyed the movie and will use the argument “well critics hated it, the audience hated it, but plenty of cult classic movies started out that way and now they're beloved!” But most of the time, movies hated by critics and audiences alike just end up eternally despised. The only way this movie can be the next Blade Runner is if the sure-to-come director’s cut does to Sucker Punch what Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of Blade Runner did to that film. This is not impossible, just very, very, very, very improbable.
