Film - Sucker Punch (2011)

I'm gonna punch you, sucka

Sucker Punch is the story of a girl known only as Babydoll (Emily Browning, A Series of Unfortunate Events), who finds herself delivered by her abusive stepfather to an insane asylum after the accidental death of her sister. While under the care of Dr Gorski (Carla Gugino, Sin City, Spy Kids) and the rapey eyes of orderly Blue (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davies), Babydoll hallucinates herself and her fellow inmates (Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone) into a burlesque house, in which they delve even further into fantasy to engage in epic, fantastical battles with monsters, robots and steampunk gasmask undead German soldiers (which must surely be what you get at the centre of the Venn Diagram of All-Time Cliched Enemies). By fighting these battles, Babydoll and her friends hope to acquire four essential items - a map, a fire, a key, and a knife. In doing so, they hope to find a way to escape the burlesque house, escape the asylum, and escape the living hell their realities have become.

Blue here is the only character with an actual personality: a smug,
annoying, overconfident, rapey git.

Except for this film, Zack Snyder has become recognised for his cinematic midwifery, dutifully if not masterfully delivering the intellectual children of George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead) and Frank Miller (300); the swiftly-disowned sprog of Alan Moore (Watchmen); and the test-tube golden boy of DC Comics (Man of Steel). Watchers of Watchmen and 300 will know that Snyder has an eye for elaborate, heightened visuals reminiscent of graphic novels, but can he bring that same flair to the script, the story, and the cast of characters he now finds it his responsibility to bring into this world as he finally embraces the life-creating powers of his own cinematic motherhood?

No. No he can't.

Like Inception, released a year beforehand - I would imagine while this film was in production, so it probably wasn't an influence - Sucker Punch toys with the idea of multiple levels of reality and hallucination that become more fantastical the further down you go. Between the levels, there are various symbolic connections - the asylum psychiatrist becomes the brothel's madame, for example - often based either on the characters or upon the visual motifs required by the plot (for example, the lighter that Babydoll steals in the brothel world is represented in the fantasy world by fire crystals). However, we spend the majority of our time in the brothel world rather than the asylum - the real world, and thus the only one that could be said to 'matter'. This, of course, should not present problems on its own: we spent much more time in Inception's dream worlds than its real one. However, the connections between each world only function on a symbolic level and not a logical one. Doubtless you're supposed to nod and appreciate the interweaving elements between the worlds, but there is no moment where you realise how clever it all is: the film only leaves you with questions. From start to finish, with its highly-stylised Gothic aesthetic, dreamlike visuals and psychedelic musical moments, Sucker Punch radiates a ‘clever me’ pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness that could give lessons in ‘rubbing you up the wrong way’ to a sandpaper suppository. 

Actually, this fight is sort of fine. At this stage the film still seems
like it's actually going to get deeper.

As usual, we reach the part of the review where I discuss characters. Like recent review Non-Stop, Sucker Punch makes this difficult. Non-Stop makes this difficult by sketching the characters as thinly as possible to preserve mystery and suspense. Sucker Punch makes this difficult because it doesn't have characters: it just has stuffed costumes that move around and deliver lines with all the enthusiasm of a postman who's one rainy bike ride away from a killing spree. It’s a mark of the total lack of substance to every single element of this film that isn’t the CGI that when lead character Babydoll finally has her lobotomy, I either didn’t notice the difference or just didn’t care enough to. As far as the film seems to show us, Babydoll belongs in the asylum. Her first reaction to her stepfather trying to steal her and her sister’s inheritance is to shoot him – and even in a tremendously confined space, she somehow, in violation of physics, common sense and possibility itself, manages to miss the bulk of her overweight stepfather and hit her small sister crouching harmlessly in a corner. What’s more, she’s clearly so psychologically unstable that within minutes of arriving at the asylum not only is she hallucinating, but her hallucinations are hallucinating too. To make matters worse, the other girls making up the team are virtually characterless aside from the usual tedious old archetypes (the groundlessly confrontational bitchy one, the quirky and amusing one, the reluctant one who doesn’t want to get involved, and… the other one. Christ knows what her personality may have been), and the film doesn't even bother to make clear what the connection between the various ‘dream levels’ might be. Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) is the one who escapes at the end, so she is clearly real, but the rest? I have no idea. And if they’re not real, why should the audience care about their problems, or when they die? Rocket (Jena Malone) dies in the action-fantasy world, so she also dies in the brothel world… does that mean she also dies in the asylum world (if she’s even there)? And if she is there and doesn’t die, what happens to her? The movie doesn’t tell you. 

The Wise Man prepares to go over the top. If only the film had
enough character to do the same.

The excitement and satisfaction of watching Inception lies in the audience being able to see and appreciate the clever links between the various dream levels – how physical changes in one affect movement or gravity in another, and how the time distortion works in relation to the music and the falling van used as the ‘kick’. But even more satisfyingly, all of these elements are logically connected both to each other and to the real world Cobb and Fischer. Sucker Punch, by contrast, never bothers to explain how any of the links between its nested worlds work, or how they relate to the real one. How does doing a dance in the brothel world equate to fighting an army of Orcs in the fantasy world (and why would any of Babydoll’s audience think that the doubtless deranged flailing that results makes for a nice dance)? What sort of obstacles does one meet in pickpocketing a lighter that they would also meet in fighting an army of Orcs to steal fire crystals from a dragon? How does retrieving the lighter in the brothel by dancing equate to retrieving a lighter in the asylum? I don’t know, and I have a horrible feeling that Zack Snyder doesn’t know either. I suspect that Snyder simply tossed a couple of trite symbols and associated images up in the air and linked them together as flimsily as sheer laziness would allow so that they still formed some vague semblance of a plot – and I use the word as loosely as anyone possibly can. I can slightly believe that the brothel’s High Roller (Jon Hamm), who is actually the surgeon assigned to perform Babydoll’s lobotomy, might have visited the asylum beforehand and she might know what he looks like in order to hallucinate him. What I do not understand is how in the name of God’s tit the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) acting as Babydoll’s hallucinatory mentor can also turn out to be a random bus driver that Babydoll has neither seen nor met before. It comes across as Snyder’s take on Nolan’s wobbling totem (oo-er), but there’s a fine line between introducing ambiguity and introducing confusion. Christopher Nolan is very good at walking that line before tying everything up neatly at the end. Snyder is not even aware that there is such a line, much less how to resolve his movie satisfactorily once he’s crossed it. 

In some ways, it's very impressive that a movie can make a
sight like this boring.

Sucker Punch constantly tries to make you go “Ah!”, but only ever manages to inspire “Eh?”. Adding to the simply unexplained mysteries above, there are glaring logical inconsistencies springing like leaks in a cartoon plumbing system, and Snyder just doesn't have the flexible Looney Tune anatomy to plug them all. Are we expected to believe that a high profile surgeon could attend the asylum, in order to perform a lobotomy on a new patient who has been resident for less than a week, without the knowledge of that patient’s own supervising psychiatrist? Characters messing up in movies because they don’t communicate like real people is an all-too-common and regrettable staple of fiction, but it is especially egregious here. Surely, after receiving the forged lobotomy request, there should have been a phone call that went something like: 

        “Hello, Dr Gorski, I’m just confirming that I can come and perform the procedure on your patient.”

          “What procedure?”

          “The lobotomy on Babydoll.” 

          “I didn’t authorise that.”

          “This signature says you did.”

          “BLUUUUEEEEE!” *angry fist shaking* 

Even if such a conversation didn’t happen, are we supposed to believe that at no point between the lobotomy being arranged – itself impossible at such short notice or regarding a patient who hasn’t even been diagnosed yet – and it being performed was Dr Gorski made aware of the fact that her own newest patient was scheduled for a serious operation? Did she not look at her own patient’s file? Did she not ask why the surgeon came to the asylum without – as far as she knows – being asked? Did no-one else who works at the asylum see ‘her’ letter requesting the lobotomy and ask her what the hell she was doing?

Stare at this picture for a few seconds, while listening to some
trippy psychedelic music, bobbing your head about until you feel
dizzy and remembering the last experience that made you feel
generally dissatisfied. You have now basically watched the film.

I won’t comment much on the portrayal of women in this film, mainly because it’s too confusing to really go into. I’m not sure whether it’s a dumb, teenage masturbatory fantasy that reduces women to tempting confections who can snarl and fight against men as long as they can never actually win, or whether it’s a satire of dumb, teenage masturbatory fantasies that reduce women to tempting confections who can snarl and fight against men as long as they can never actually win. But, as the film fails tremendously on both counts, I won’t really go into it. All I will say is that any film that features over-sexualised, schoolgirl-costumed girls whose looks are the sum total of their personalities in a world where nearly every male character is either literally or symbolically a rapist has me very worried indeed. However, in all honesty, to even pay enough attention to the film to be angered by its ideology is a service that it doesn’t deserve – you’d almost certainly be putting more thought into it than its creators did. It would be disingenuous of me to imply that Sucker Punch is the only film that suffers from these problems: it’s not. I also do not say that films with these problems are necessarily bad: they aren’t. But what a film – a good film – needs to have to overcome such problems is a hook. Something the audience can latch onto to hold their interest and pull them through the tangled, brambly forest of the treacherous roots and clutching branches of inconsistent plotting, meandering or non-existent story, flat characters and uninspired or downright ill-advised performances. Flash Gordon, for example, suffers from many of these problems (with the exception of the performances which are all solid gold ham), but the over-the-top cheesiness and outrageous camp pulls it through. Sucker Punch has nothing. What the film attempts to demonstrate in visual flair and imagination carries no weight because it relies entirely on bombastic but insubstantial CGI. The only area in which the film could have clawed back some precious points is in its soundtrack, which features a generally-appropriate selection of licensed music, except that every track is a uniformly-awful cover, and I quite simply cannot forgive the treatment of even one of my least favourite of the Beatles' oeuvre like this. I suppose I could be being unfair on the film - perhaps I am expecting too much of it? But, perusing the reviews, I see words like "repellent", "dull", "boring" and "soul-crushing". Overall, the film was received about as popularly as a fat lactose intolerant man chugging four-cheese pizzas in a stranded lift full of dwarfs. 

Snyder’s 300 was just as shallow as this film, but the hilariously larger-than-life performances of its cast ensure it remains a fairly entertaining watch, even if slow motion is overused to the extent that the movie would be about twenty minutes long without it, and 300 at least had the selling point that it wasn’t an original Snyder work (although I personally find Frank Miller’s usual portrayals of women, homosexuals or indeed any group other than burly white guys even more worrying than in this film). Sucker Punch looks good in parts. That’s it. By the close of the film, Babydoll has undergone a lobotomy; the audience will be wishing they had; and the film itself doesn't have enough brains to be worth opening up its skull for. Perhaps the only clever part of this film is the way that the first word of the title tells you what you are for watching it and the second word suggests a more fulfilling experience to subject yourself to.

0/10 - It's a mad, sad, bad, flat world