Zach Snyder, director of “300” and “Watchmen,” tries out his writing chops for the first time with “Sucker Punch,” a story about a wrongly committed girl who attempts an insane asylum escape. Well actually there is five of them and they’re prostitutes in a bordello and um…The whole escape thing involves fighting World War I, giant mechanical samurais, a dragon…and it all takes place at or in uh…imagination land…you know what? I’ll get back to that. “Sucker Punch” lives up to its title. It is a totally unpredictable unapologetic excess of heightened emotion, ultra violence, and stylistic overindulgence. You can arguably say that “Sucker Punch” is a bad movie but that's sort of like remarking that Opera isn’t realistic enough. I will say this though about Snyder. I’ve always had the feeling while watching his movies that I was witnessing something unmistakably new. If “Sucker Punch” is folly, it is at least my favorite kind. An ambitious one.
The movie starts with your average worst-case scenario. A woman dies. She leaves her entire estate to her two daughters. The evil stepfather gets enraged and with largely incestuous overtones attacks his kids. The older daughter, a girl named Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning, runs to get a gun but returns to late. Her sister has been murdered. The evil stepfather frames Baby Doll and gets her committed to an insane asylum. He then bribes the sadistic operator, played by Oscar Isaac, to have Baby Doll lobotomized within the week.
At this point, the movie becomes a completely different parallel movie, whereupon it seems that Baby Doll imagines herself to be a prostitute in a bordello, who is to be sold to a character called the High Roller within the week. She enlists the help of four other fellow prostitutes, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung), and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) to plan an escape. They will need a map, a cigarette lighter, a knife, and a key. The plan is for Baby Doll to put on a highly entertaining burlesque act that will distract all the men in order for the others to steal the items.
I left something out. In the asylum story, there is a psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) who has the inmates perform their sad stories on a theater stage as a sort of therapy. In the bordello, she is a madame who runs the burlesque show. When Baby Doll starts dancing (or supposedly acting out therapy in the first storyline) the movie switches over into battle scenes, which include the five girls donning salacious battle-rattle and fighting various armies for the items. They have to kill Zombie Germans stationed in World War I trenches for the map, a fire-breathing dragon for the fire, and so on. Throughout most of this you can sort of tell what is actually happening in the other story-lines although you may have some very good questions. Like for instance, why is this woman imagining herself in a so very male fantasy world. Or who is the Scott Glenn character, a wise entity that shows up only in the battle fantasies to intone enjoyably ridiculous advice, supposed to be in reality, whatever that is.
The best answer I think is that the several story-worlds have less to do with plot or logic and much more to do with giving Snyder an excuse to zealously indulge into what could perhaps be called an “artistic vision.” I’m guessing he worked backward with a thought process like this: How can I get a team of scantily clad women to battle World War I zombies, medieval dragons, and science fiction robots, all in the same movie? Well, it can totally be in the imagination of a stripper on a mission. That would provide the excuse for putting them in full makeup and revealing outfits the entire time. But wait, what type of stripper would be crazy enough to imagine all that? Well, perhaps if the stripper was but the schizophrenic alter ego of a truly insane woman. But wait, what would make someone be that bat shit crazy? Aha! I’ll have her father kill her sister and frame her for it! Break out the champagne! I’m going to start up the drawings for the gigantic samurai robots!
Really, your enjoyment of this movie is not going to come from the plot or character development. It will come from your willingness to enjoy stand-alone set pieces of ridiculously outfitted women battling equally ridiculous things. In that aspect, the movie truly delivers. The action scenes are outrageous and innovative. Helpfully, Snyder also has the habit of using slow motion. This allows the viewer to admire the artistic still frame, which in turn stops the action from becoming a Bayesian mish mash of mindless confusion. Outside the battle scenes, there is also plenty to admire in style if not in substance. I especially like the camera angles and the exaggerated details in objects and characters. (The Mayor and Cook were my favorite grotesquely comical caricatures). Plenty of attention is placed on composition, color palette, and atmosphere. Snyder’s use of green screen in every shot allows him the requisite control to stylize every single shot. The voiceovers and serious talk could have been more poetic and Snyder's choice of music isn't very good, but still there is a truly great movie waiting somewhere in Snyder’s style. I hope to someday see it.
The character development in this movie leaves something to be desired. I don’t think it was a very good idea to name the characters Sweet Pea, Amber, or Baby Doll. Blondie is okay I guess. But really, given what the women are made to do, the only name that makes any sense is Rocket. She’s played by Jena Malone and is appropriately the only actor here that gives off any lasting impression. (Emily Browning on the other hand seems to have been cast solely on her ability to look sad). Jena you may remember from “Donnie Darko” and “Into the Wild” and probably don’t remember from one of my favorite hidden movies, “Cheaters.” She deserves to be on the short list of underrated and perpetually underused actresses. Her presence here lends the team its admittedly limited amount of credibility.
Two more things. The makers will have you believe that this contains themes of female empowerment. Plenty of critics, including two I highly respect A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, say it is decisively misogynistic. I disagree with both. It’s neither. It’s a comic book movie and as such it contains a certain style that equally applies to both men and women. The good guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal beauty and the bad guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal ugliness. I don’t recall anybody saying that the one-dimensional Spartans in “300” with their ridiculously perfect perpetually uncovered abdominals were somehow demeaning to men. They simply commented on how nice the abs looked. That attitude should be applied to the heroines of this movie. It's true, Snyder deals in the objectification of people. But then again so do all comic books, and for that matter anything dealing with fashion, or why not the entire branch of art called Humanism going all the way back to when Michelangelo added all those muscles in the Sistine Chapel for no other reason than he thought the human body was an admirable thing and that there was no harm in making it look its best. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and people may logically be turned off by the presentation of these women (or like me have a preference for one amongst the others), but I don’t think anyone can argue that Snyder, or for that matter his wife/executive producer Deborah Snyder, wasn’t trying to make the team look as gorgeous as he thought possible. There's nothing wrong with that.
As far as the plenty of "women in danger" material in this movie, I can’t see how you can have an action movie without it. If there isn’t any danger, there isn’t any conflict. The movie might as well have taken place at a shooting range with the bad guys being cardboard cutouts. The test I would think is whether the makers intend the audience to empathize primarily with the women: Do they mean for us to feel scared when they are in danger and to be relieved when they are triumphant? I think the answer to that is obvious in this movie. If the test worked any other way than every movie with a female action star would be automatically exploitative. That would include Ripley, Clarice Starling, and Lisbeth Salandar. Truly we would be missing out by keeping all those fictional women in the movie universe up on their pedestals totally safe all the time.
Having said that, the PG-13 rating is completely absurd, a perfect example of how hypocritical the MPAA can be. Future moviemakers take note. You can kill all you want just as long as there isn’t any blood. You can present sexual violence just as long as there isn’t any nudity. And you can have characters yell "motherfucker" just as long as you cut out the audio for the second half of the word. Of course, the most ridiculous thing is what the MPAA apparently thought was too objectionable to keep in. The credits and trailer show what sort of look to be like the actual burlesque shows that we never get to see in the movie. So apparently murder and near-rape is fine, but a song and dance number that the women seem to be actually enjoying isn’t. Hmm…now is that misogynistic?
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