Exiting the theater, I wondered whether a Blu-Ray print of Sucker Punch might be the ideal fodder for calibrating a new television set. I later recanted this, concluding that the saturation and contrast levels might be misleading to the consumer. Still, depending on the bit-rate, home theater enthusiasts might find the audio mix useful.
As for story and performance and direction, Sucker Punch is less a model to be revered and emulated than the wreckage of a rail disaster to be picked through, its black box archived, its cargo cataloged.
If you downloaded and maximized that first theatrical trailer in 1080p all those months ago, thrilling to the anime steampunk slasher brawler mashup on a PC or laptop, and wondered whether this might not be the zenith of Sucker Punch‘s capacity to captivate, peel off another star sticker and add it to your name card under the blackboard.
While a theatrical screening of the feature isn’t entirely a cruise through the doldrums, the material meant to serve as connective tissue betwixt the fantasy shoot ’em up sequences does little to enhance them. A trailer is bound to exploit the biggest and boldest visuals, surveying only the peaks and saving the riches of the valleys for the multiplex. That is its job. In this case, there are few riches to be mined in sights unseen in the trailer. There is no genuine value in the context. Or to put in crass terms perhaps befitting the tone of the film, there’s no greater high to be achieved by delaying the rush of the climax. If anything, the setup masquerading as narrative diminishes those moments of cinematic pleasure, which feel few and far between in this two hour slog.
But let’s talk about that story. (SPOILER WARNING: PLOT POINTS DISCUSSED)
Layer one. A young woman known only as Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is framed for the murder of her younger sister by a villainous stepfather. She is ushered to a grimy mental institution, where an orderly weasels two grand out of the old cad to bury the truth of his transgressions. Jon Hamm will be coming in a few days, and the orderly will forge the proper signature to have the girl lobotomized. Daddy pays up, and Baby Doll joins the ranks of a colorless rabble of lost girls, some of whom will play feature roles in the dreams to come.
Layer two. A jarring transition leads us down the rabbit hole to a second reality where the staff and patients of bedlam are the staff and working girls of an illicit cabaret club. The crooked orderly is now a monologuing owner and operator called Blue (Oscar Isaac, though he thinks he’s Al Pacino), and the fast approaching lobotomizer is now a High Roller. Everybody gets code names, right down to the dancing girls Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). The girls lead a hard-knock hot pants life, dancing for Blue’s crooked contacts by night and scrubbing floors by day. Always in fishnets and bustiers, as if on constant call to strut their stuff at the drop of a money clip. It’s all very Cabaret, but here, nobody goes home. At least nobody’s dancing around in a gorilla costume. And though it all feels a bit like Nazi Germany, there are no swastikas in this level of the story. That’s reserved for the dance levels.
Going down.
Layer three. Women’s hosiery. Samurai swords. Guns. And even a literal/figurative train wreck. When Baby Doll dances, she goes to another place. And I will admit that this is a cool, albeit inconsistent concept. We never see Baby’s actual dance routine, though we’re told it’s raw, uninhibited, with a lot of moaning. What we do see is a slow zoom up to the pained girl’s face, up to her eyelashes, where we get the first hints of the fantasy world to which she’s about to escape. A snowflake. A wisp of smoke. While she dances at the club, serving as a distraction for the staff and clients of the cabaret, her friends go about collecting items (one of many reasons this movie is considered a passive video game experience). Rather than watching Amber attempt to pick the corpulent mayor’s pockets for a cigar lighter, we view the experience through Baby’s dreamscape. This is the stuff we see in those trailers. A battle between a school girl and some giant bushido golems. Trench warfare featuring the full ensemble and a host of clockwork nazi zombies. A quest for mystic fire amidst an epic goblin siege. A high speed train robbery rife with gun toting androids and a timed explosive.
These dance fantasies are mostly a joy to watch. These are anachronistic mashups of all the tropes action and fantasy fans thrill to, and I’m no exception. The second fantasy, featuring all of the girls in what’s essentially a level of Resistance or some other trench based FPS against steam and clockwork powered corpses, is a fantastic mini-movie of its own. Comparatively, it’s also the one least plagued by slow motion (though I’m sure it’s there is spades). Other scenes leave me a little conflicted, as in the segment where they sort of pointlessly slaughter a baby dragon to rob it of its thyroid crystals to summon a fireworks display that fails to yield any concrete objective (at least in the fantasy layer). There’s also a scene where the girl smuggle music into the kitchen to hypnotize the cook with Baby’s dance routine. I’m willing to go with the idea that Baby’s moves can distract a captive audience, but this scene pushes the rules a bit too far, suggesting that the dance is something akin to mystical snake-charming, even in the claustrophobic environment of the kitchen, where the cook is surrounded by five girls who ought not be there. That said, this fantasy sequence–the train robbery–does deliver an interesting nuance reminiscent of Inception. The cook wakes up in the middle of the routine, disrupting the fantasy. This allows for parallel action between the two layers of reality. The cook’s sudden awareness of the girls’ plot to steal a knife leads to an obstacle in the train robbery. It’s a great instance of cause and effect in an otherwise problematic sequence.
There are no shortage of story and structural problems, perhaps too many to name. Chief among them is our dramatic distance from the proceedings. It all comes back to the stakes. There really aren’t any, because unlike Inception, Sucker Punch doesn’t ground its dream levels with a solid foundation of reality (or even the illusion of reality, depending on your reading of the former film). Sucker Punch is a dream within a dream within a dream, even if we’re meant to understand the mental institution layer as the true reality. If anything, the flamboyant Cabaret layer is depicted with the most stability. Because the film opens with an honest to donuts to music video, presented almost entirely in a dreamlike slow motion. The WB logo dissolves through a series of theatrical curtains to what appears to be a dollhouse. There is an essentially incomprehensible VO from a character I won’t reveal here, but otherwise the scene plays out with no dialogue. Music against visual action. This is where we learn of Baby Doll’s home life, of her mother’s death, of her father’s rage at being cut out of the will. We see him advance upon the girls. When he throttles Baby, a button pops off of her shirt and we watch as it impacts against the floor, spinning like a discarded manhole cover. Every frame is a burst of visual impact issued with dramatic flourish. Sucker Punch. Sucker Punch. Sucker Punch. Cool on their own perhaps, but delivered with such frequency, it’s optic noise. All of this music video style over substance, floating over walking, lends this introduction a dreamlike quality even more surreal than the action fantasy sequences. And that means we don’t look at Baby or her friends as anything but figments. Peril and death ring hollow. When that happens, even the coolest set pieces lose their resonance. That’s why context actually hurst in this instance.
Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.
While previous films have seen Zack Snyder pounding on the chest of Bullet Time in the cinematic ICU, refusing DNR forms, Sucker Punch is more of a Weekend at Bernie’s situation. He shuttles the technique via hand truck from sequence to sequence, either relentless to restore the maneuver to its former glory, or blissfully unaware that we’ve long since reached our saturation point. It only reminds us of the director’s intentions, and robs us of the illusionary quality of story. Do the trick enough times without patter, and it stops being a mystery. Novelty becomes cliche. It also, quite literally, slows the movie down. Let us miss a few frames. He’s good enough to cut away just before a really glaring panty shot, though at this speed, little is left to the imagination. Any I’m only really talking about the scenes where a skirt conceals undergarments. Because there are plenty when the underwear is the full extent of the costume.
Is it exploitative? Well, yeah. Everyone seems to be having fun though. The only time you feel truly ashamed, truly dirty, are in the moments leading up to Baby’s dance. She’s so tiny, so much younger looking than her character’s 20 years. She looks like a child surrounded by salivating wolves. So it’s a relief to escape the scene with her, to something frivolous and bombastic. To a scene where she’s empowered. Where the hungry gazes do not follow. The overt message of the film is certainly empowerment. It even ends with a call to action. This falls flat in its earnestness. We tune out the opening and closing narration because it’s just babble. I don’t look at Snyder’s vision being empowering or demeaning. Because in the end, he’s not really saying much of anything. His need to wrap the cabaret fantasy in the trappings of the mental hospital layer truly baffles. It seems like a superfluous thread that ought to have been abandoned in an earlier draft. Had he excised it, this might’ve been fluffy cheesecake fun. It could’ve been something like Kill Bill. Instead, it’s a vapid mess with some tantalizing proofs of concept.
So, the big question. Is Snyder fit to helm Superman: Man of Steel? Do I feel confident that he can make us believe, once again, that a man can fly? I think if he heeds these devastating reviews and tones down the flourishes, he can indeed take us to places like Krypton and Metropolis. Maybe even Smallville. We also need to remember he’ll be working from a script by David Goyer. That helped me sleep last night. This can work. Though I’d be outright lying to you if I said I can look at J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 trailer without wanting to close my eyes and escape to another reality, where circumstances, and creative credits, were just a little bit different.
1 Star
Out of a sky full of ’em
Paul Montgomery hates to see a good dirigible go to waste. He has a bachelor of science degree in screenwriting and playwriting from Drexel University and writes from Philadelphia. To hear more of his thoughts on movies and story, check out his podcast Fuzzy Typewriter. Find him on Twitter or drop him an email.
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I have to wonder… were you puposefully emulating the “flourishes” of the movie with your writing?
The one my friend described this movie was this. “Take all your favorite action movies, animes, comics, and video games or whatever. Take Deathwish 3, Gunsmith Cats, The Matrix, Starcraft, take all shit like that and then take out all things that made those pieces interesting, fun, engaging, and enjoyable. And then throw up vomit all over it. That’s Sucker Punch.”
He also said that more than half the theatre left before it was over(including him). When he left, the only people still there were young kids who were talking and barely paying attention. Can we see this being Snyders second flop?
@itsbecca Ouch! I hope the analysis and commentary are still useful.
The one question I have about the story is that of if the “reality” the mental institution is necessary? Would it benefit being just a fantasy reality, or do audiences really need to have some “reality” like the matrix to ground the film.
And I think that Snyder works well when he has someone to keep him in check and help him, which nolan will do, and agree that a script by goyer instead of snyder will be a big help.
Paul, theatre or wait for Blu?
@PaulMontgomery Sure sure, it confirmed some of my hesitations (although I skipped over anything describing plot points because I like to watch something with as fresh as eyes as possible.)
And I didn’t mean it as a barb, by the by. It’s a common sort of thing for a style of writing to be slightly tweaked by the content. I imagine it’s driven by mood. I was just curious if it was intentional or subconscious.
Damn, I was really looking forward to this. 300 and Watchmen were fantastic, and I’m a huge fan of Snyder’s stylistic cinematography. I even liked the whole slow motion – speed up thing. Oh well, I may still watch it anyway.
@WeaklyRoll Given my druthers, I’d rather the cabaret club was the fundamental reality. Even if it’s a silly one. Flesh that out (no pun intended) to give girls like Amber and Blondie more to do and make the plight feel more immediate. Less Shutter Island, more Little Orphan Annie meets Kill Bill.
I like to think it’s sometime worthwhile to watch a bad movie just to learn from it. And the action sequences are frequently entertaining. So it may be worth going to the theater for it if you’re curious about it. Just know what you’re getting into. That said, something like Rango is a better use of your money if we’re talking priorities.
Wow, and to think I was about to go and see this movie, but just based on your review (albeit as well as the other scathing reviews from just about every site and movie review paper) I think I’ll pass.
Paul, you hit the nail on the head with this review. If people just read your second paragraph, they will know all that they need to pass this carnage by.
If this movie is an attempt at a passive video game experience, well it did that. But the narrative, the ‘stakes’, the tension were all so very, very bad. I just did not care, at all, about anyone (except for Scott Glenn, but that was only because I thought that part was unintentionally hilarious).
I hope that this is the last time that someone lets Snyder out without a leash. When he is reigned in (Dawn of the Dead, 300) he is on point, but when he is off the chain, he is much more plot than narrative.
I went in thinking this was going to be Girl Interuppted meets 300. I didn’t like it but didn’t hate it either. Some of it was enjoyable while being a mess. I actually think his Superman will look awesome.
i was going to see this, but now its maybe a netflix. This is interesting because Snyder’s best work happens when its storyboarded in full detail (aka a comic book) but original stuff, he’s not so good at which is extremely telling. All visuals but little storytelling.
How could anyone look at these previews and think this movie wasn’t supposed to be anything But
a series of visuals.
if I had my “druthers” I would have Paul stop off at the Kyber for a few beers before attending the next movie for review.
@ericmci Pretty simple answer. Because we saw previews for Matrix and for 300, and they were promoted in much the same way, and those were more than just visuals.
Are you suggesting that we should expect less and not more from our entertainment?
@ericmci Because it’s clearly intended to be more cerebral than all that. Watching the movie, it’s evident that Snyder had grander ambitions for it. If anything I’m saying I wish the movie were more fluffy and fun.
MisterJ- I am just going to say – you’re wrong on that.
School girls with Kung-fu battles skills are a bit different than ancient warriors of actual history and the previews for the Matrix certainly hinted at more- But in any event- the point stands-
Be surprised when something is more than it apears- But dont be when it is exactly what it screams at you that it is.
“It perfectly personifies it’s name, but it no way can you hold it down to an idea”
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/sucker-punch/interview-zack-snyder
Well-written review, Mr. Montgomery.
@ericmci In that clip he’s talking about the significance of Sucker Punch as a title and how there’ no direct reasoning behind it. But he also says the movie itself is full of “symbols” and “concepts.” And is “real.” Either way, I’m writing about the end product and not what he’s saying for sound bites. He used these framing devices for a reason, and I don’t think they’re sound ones. You saying I should’ve had a beer before checking out the movie is really off point, because I’m actually saying the movie’s fun is bogged down by needless contrivances.
This is no different than 90% of comic books. Terrible writing, cool visuals. And yet comics get a pass because they’re comics?
@RonSwanson Not on this website.
wow…that bad eh?
Just saw it. Not bad, but nothing to write home about. Scott Pilgrim x Kill Bill / Girl, Interrupted. As a straight up movie, it doesn’t hold together, thematically or structurally. On the other hand, as a sprectacle it’s damn near perfect. The cinematography and the juxtaposition works really, really well, and the acting is pretty effective.
Again, not bad, in my humble. Not worth another view, but not a bad way to spend 5 bucks (caught the morning show).
Oh, but all the Inception comparisons that everyone is making are getting on my nerves. True, this movie does not do an effective job of making good use of it’s multiple layers of reality, so much so that I spent the first half of the movie thinking that the asylum was a cover for a bordello (which, incidently, would have made for a better movie).
It does, however, avoid Inception’s tedious, mind-numbing and needlessly complicated 45-minute explanation of it’s world jumping, relying more on style and atmosphere than narritive-killing exposition. It doesn’t succeed perfectly, but it certainly does a better job than Nolan’s single dud.
@ericmci Are you suggesting that 300 actually happened or that the battle of Thermopylae happened because those are two completely different things.
Regardless, that is a specious quibble. Are you telling me that if one watched all the trailers for those movies without the context of actually watching the movie you would be able to say anything more than ‘those are visually ambitious movies, I hope the story holds together’? All any of them contain is a bunch of visuals with voice overs of seemingly profound messages.
Heh. Eh. Yikes. Nice review. This is the sort of movie where the reviews are more entertaining and illuminating than the actual film. I’m not sure what to think of Snyder. I think my gut reaction to him once I saw the Watchmen project being unveiled was unfortunately right: the guy’s too heavy-handed in his delivery and just doesn’t get what made projects special. That tendency was excusable in 300, because 300’s overt bombast hid Snyder’s shortcomings.
@Casey: Yeah, but in those same explanatory scenes in Inception you also got characterization. I don’t think Inception was a perfect movie, but it balanced things out pretty well. You can’t really accuse it of being over explanatory when the first 20 minutes of the movie just throws you into the movie unexplained. After that, you sort of have to have a bit of calm explanation, and when you’re changing scenes and introducing characters at the same time, I think it works.
This movie is so polarizing but I fall on the side of liking it. Rrom a storytelling perpective it’s not good at all. The major problem is just the clutter of it all, Inception was able to pull it off a story like this becuase Nolan basicly filled the first 2 acts with exposition and explainations so the viewer could understand the end. But “Sucker Punch” almost does the exact opposite Zack Snyder seems to make no attempt to explain what’s going on to the audience so it all just comes off as a confusing mess.
But were the movie won me over was with the great action set pieces and action and sexuality taken to the extreme. At one point in the movie a giant Samurai, who only seemed to made of pure light, pulled out a bazooka AND a gatling gun and started shooting at Emily Browning who was wearing the skimpiest school girl outfit I’ve ever seen outside of porn. Thats pretty much what this movie is one excuse for an action scene followed by another. And these action scenes are filled with things like exploitons, steam powered nazi soilders and phallic shaped blimps. That type of thing isn’t for everyone so I do understand the critical thrashing but I thought the pure “over-the-top-ness” of it all was enjoyable.
And for the record no one should even begin to think Zack Snyder’s Superman is gonna look anything like this. Sucker Punch is the type of movie that gets made when a director is allowed to go hog wilde and do what ever he wants. Superman on the unther hand is a property that WB is gonna put 200 million dollars into so there’s gonna be a few people making sure Zack stays on track….not to mention the biggest problem with this movie was the poor script not the execution that Zack Snyder won’t be writing Superman.
thank you i’m glad someone else appreciated this movie. it may not be perfect in it’s story line but my god the action was great not to mention the girls……
@RonSwanson —you’ve obviously never read a user review or comment for a comic book on this site. lol
I don’t know, I just got back from seeing it, & I liked it, I thought it was a fun escape from the bullshit known as reality, I think the people who are crapping all over it, were expecting way more than this movie was suppose to be, it’s hot bitches blowing shit up, it’s not suppose to be some masterpeice work of filmmaking or anything, just a fun way to escape for a couple hours
The trench scene was all sorts of ass-kicking goodness, but man this movie was terrible as a whole and far too serious that it takes away from what should be entertaining insanity.
Rocket was hot though.
I wonder if paul felt like a lay man might have felt watching 300 or Watchmen because of the lack of familiarity with th source material
RonSwanson is kind of right too. there’s a lot of crap out there that people give a pass to or even irrationally geek out over. sometimes I feel like pulling my hair out over some of the views of this site.
however – gosh darn it – i may not agree with you but i’ll fight for your right to disagree
Paul, Excellent review. I went to see this film today, though it wasn’t what I originally intended to see, and left almost completely baffled. I had heard some negative buzz around the movie, but I was determined to give it a fair shake. The narrative flow of the film was so disjointed that I rarely knew what was up. I was waiting for a big tying-everything-up moment, but it never materialized.
Giving credit where it’s due though, I enjoyed the two music videos (covers of “Sweet Dreams” and “White Rabbit”), and while Jon Hamm’s short time on screen wasn’t worth the price of admission alone, it did help.
I liked it but I didn’t think I was great or anything. I think there were definitely part where the whole team said “lets just make this look really cool”
I was entertained.
heheh… oh, I kinda wish you had saved this for a Fuzzy Typewriter podcast, Paul. I saw the movie today, too, and I have a lot of comments. Many of ’em similar to yours. Nice write up. 😉
(on the other hand, the FT podcast is generally about loving movies, books, and comics — so this may not be a good subject. 😉 )
@froggulper – Funny, I thought this movie did a better job fleshing out most of it’s characters than Inception did. I recognize, however, that I’m in the VAST minorily with that opinion.
I’m surprised by how many people seem to have completely missed all the “meta” commentary Snyder was making in this movie about how nerd culture tends to escape into fantasy worlds in order to avoid their own self destructive behavior. I mean, I thought he laid it on pretty thick, starting with the scene where “sweet pea” is placed in a mock up set almost “parodying” the previous scene and proceeds to comment on how ridiculous the premise of the film is.
The irony of the reviewer getting so caught up in the visuals and cultural memes that he missed the entire point about how our culture gets too caught up in visuals and cultural memes is actually kind of funny.
I have no idea how you make a chick diving off a helicopter to fight a dragon with a katana boring, but somehow this movie managed to do so. Not only was it poorly constructed; incoherent; and devoid of emotional investment after the (actually very effective) opening, it was also just brutally misogynistic. I’m not talking about fan service, or scanty costume design – that was honestly really tame. But the deeper undercurrents were alot more disturbing than any number of upskirt shots could ever be: I don’t want to go into spoilers, but it’s like Snyder had a checklist of the hallmarks of modern feminist film, and made a special point of spitting on every single one of them. The result is a movie that’s both incredibly unsatisfying, and largely incoherent. It might actually have one of the worst movie endings of all time, too. If you didn’t hate Sucker Punch for the first hour, the ending will probably seal the deal. I went from just bored and disappointed, to being downright pissed off for about half a dozen reasons.
Is this movie basically Pans Labyrinth with all the artistic merit taken out?
What I am Saying and I think a few other people is-
This end product here is no surprise- I think the clip also illustrated that Zach wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do with the movie as a whole- which is what I think you are also saying in a v ery round about way.
Furthermore this isn’t complicated it is what it is and that isn’t a surprise- or atleast it shouldn’t be. It wasnt going to be a good movie the only thing you could have hoped for was fun
and yes after the fact you can say ‘I wish there had been more fun’ but did you Really look at this in previews and posters and think that there wasn’t a chance this was could suck real hard??
The beer comment wasn’t meant to say -only examine this as a “fun” piece it was meant to say chillout before you sit down and write 10,000 words about suckerpunch.
This whole review could have beeen two paragraphs long and been more than sufficient so say eveything that needed to be about this movie.
Are we really comparing this movie to Inception? That’s like comparing Nosferatu with Twilight.
@daccampo yeah, it’s CWM that’s used for the hate! Or awkward Rage! Come on Dave! You know this.
@SirCox – Yes, but which one is which in that analogy?
@CaseyJustice exactly, I don’t understand everyone’s obsession with Inception. It was an exposition filled pseudo-intellectual husk of a film… no more “smart” or “clever” than suckerpunch was, it was just better at tricking the average movie goer into thinking it was smarter and more clever through cheap narrative tricks and ommisive storytelling.
Lemony Snicket is pretty decent.
@ResurrectionFlan – Did he direct that too? That movie’s pretty alright.
I couldn’t help myself to see this & now I don’t even know if I really liked it. The action scenes were absolutely incredible (although I wouldn’t recommend IMAX for this even for the action scenes b/c of the other scenes) as for the dialogue scenes and “character developments,” they were pretty bad. But what really made it all pretty worthwhile was that twisted/fun ending that summed the whole movie up. Yes this does steal Inception’s three layers of reality concept (except of course in Inception they were dreams, but whose to say if this movie weren’t a dream as well?) and there are some great samurai/Kill Bill moments in here as well. So I guess I would say if you like exploitation movies that have some bad dialogue/acting (at times) but also have some crazy/funny moments along with the action too, then Sucker Punch is just for you!
@CaseyJustice Nope but the girl is the same.
@ResurrectionFlan – Oh wow! I knew she looked familiar!
Im surprised no one else is fipping out on Ron Swanson. That is just a joke post, right? Who the hell would write 90% of comics have crap writing, and great visuals, and that is why we like them, on a site like this? It is a joke, right? I mean why would you have a username on here?
I didn’t ‘get’ it…
I’m looking forward to trying to identify all of the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz references — if there really are any….
I did like the soundtrack.
Now I haven’t seen this yet, but would the film be better Paul if you imagine it as a ‘parody’ of past Snyder films? Cause really (at least from the trailers anyways) when I see this film it really is like mixing a bunch of Snyder tropes to the ‘N’th degree. So maybe the film would be more enjoyable that way.
Also, I found it funny how quickly this film died in anticipation once the initial trailers it. When trailers first came out people were so excited for this. But by the time WB was really going full ad mode for it it seemed to lose a lot of steam.
I think everyone should be worried about Superman. I was worried when they announced him and remain worried. Nothing Snyder has made makes me think that he knows how to handle a dramatic or character moment.
I liked it. Commence the hate.
@MosteXtremeBrian – How dare you enjoy a piece of media! Burn him with fire!
My girlfriend and I went and saw it yesterday. We both enjoyed it very much. Bottom line, if you like Zack Snyder movies, you will probably like this.
One of the worst movies I’ve seen in years. NO story or character development. Boring action sequences and horrible acting. Even the slick visuals weren’t entertaining due to the underwhelming set pieces and ‘action’ sequences.
@sircox: What was his first flop? Everyone of his films made more in theater revenue than they cost. Adding in DVD sales and other merchandise, all his films have been rather large successes.