Sucker Punch

I genuinely thought Sucker Punch would be the kind of film I loved. For all the complaints from comic purists about Watchmen (which I treated as a companion piece to the comic, not a replacement) and left-leaning types about 300 (I felt it too absurdly exaggerated to be racist, though his reasoning for the line implying Spartans were anti-homosexual was unconvincing, there being no context to indicate hypocrisy), I enjoyed all Snyder’s other films, in all their dumbness, excess and music video aesthetics. I also loved Legend of the Guardians. So I fully expected to have a blast here. I was disappointed.

The story is simpler than it tries to pretend it is. An innocent young girl is institutionalised by her wicked stepfather, who bribes a worker to put the girl in for a lobotomy. She then imagines a fantasy world where she can dance herself into trances where she not only hypnotises onlookers but fantasises action-packed worlds that just happen to let Snyder show off different comic-based film styles. At the very end, these triple levels of reality are blurred: we return to the main reality, but are told much of what was fantasised really happened: Blue has his stab wound, we are told Babydoll helped another inmate to escape. Whether the final scene of happy escape for an unexpected character is real or imagined we never know. Not a bad twist.

But the let-down was the dance-fantasy portions. They were oddly repetitive: despite obviously being designed to show Snyder’s versatility, they were all just the girls kicking the butts of different comic book baddies, often in Matrix-derived slow-mo. These dream sequences could have shown wildly different worlds and story ideas, but instead the girls have minor costume changes and do kung-fu/stab things/shoot guns. There really isn’t too much difference between fighting steam-zombie soldiers, fighting orcs and fighting robots. And only the first one has a satisfying set of parallels with the middle level of fantasy. And the trouble is that this should have been a visual tour-de-force. It should at least have looked as good as 300 or Watchmen. But it didn’t. It looked dated already, and tacky. There’s no way anybody is going to be impressed by more than a few visual effects shots in ten years, and the times when actors are replaced by full-body digital models are going to look painfully fake before long at all. Plus the wire work just isn’t well-integrated, making everything look clumsily weightless rather than suggesting awesome superhuman powers of momentum.

The peripheral characters aren’t well-developed enough; the two sisters we get to know and like, the dance instructor is great for a background role and Blue ends up truly detestable, but Babydoll never gets any notable characteristics and the other two girls of the five-member gang have woefully little screen-time outside the fantasies.

I quite liked the overall concept. I liked that there were ambiguities and that the story didn’t wrap up neatly and that however you interpret the ending, what happens to Babydoll is what happens. But the disappointing visuals, the way that the layering really removes all sense of actual risk from the most exciting action scenes, the repetitive concepts and the indifferent characters prevent it from being a good film. As for the idea that it is empowering…well, that’s just rubbish.