We Have Issues offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
In a post-Watchmen/pre-Man Of Steel world, there was a feeling that Zack Snyder had a perfect chance to prove himself as a filmmaker. After making his debut with the rollocking Dawn Of The Dead remake, Snyder had followed it up by bringing two comics previously thought unfilmable to the screen with Frank Miller’s 300 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Of course, nowadays, you can totally build an entire career making nothing but comic book adaptations and remakes, but back in 2011, I was hoping that we could see what the filmmaker had up his sleeve when working with entirely new material.
What we got was Sucker Punch, a trippy action/sci-fi/fantasy/psychological drama that merged the multiple mental states of Inception with the visuals of every single record cover of every single heavy metal band from the 80s. We’re talking unfettered, uncut, undiluted, 100% Snyder on the big screen for the first time, but would this example of maximalist, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink filmmaking finally prove that the director had genuine ability to stand on his own two feet?
After the passing of her mother, and the botched rescue of her little sister from her abusive stepfather, a young woman known only to us as Babydoll is framed for her sibling’s accidental death and sent to a mental institute. In an effort to hide his crimes and get back into the family will, the stepfather bribes unfeasibly corrupt orderly Blue Jones to forge documents and have his defiant stepdaughter lobotomised in five days time.
In order to avoid this despairingly brutal world, Babydoll allows her mind to slip into a fantasy state and see the mental hospital as a gaudy brothel and Blue as a cruel mobster. Similarly, staff psychiatrist Vera Gorski becomes their dance instructor and Babydoll and her fellow inmates are reimagined as sex slaves – which seems like a bizarre thing to imagine if you’re trying to mentally massage reality into something less terrible. Anyway, making friends with some of the other girls/inmates, Babydoll soon has a group comprised of Blondie, Amber, Rocket and Rocket’s tough talking sister, Sweet Pea looking out for her, and talk invariably turns to planning an escape.
Once it’s discovered that Babydoll also has the ability to dance so provocatively that she can spellbind anyone watching, the group work out what items they need to facilitate their escape. But everytime she starts dancing, Babydoll disassociates even further by imagining each mission is actually a vast, fantastical scenario that’s sees the quintet fighting dragons, steam punk Nazis, or mirror-faced robots in make-believe worlds. As time ticks away before the “high-roller” comes to take Babydoll away (fantasy speak for her incoming lobotomy), can the girls grab the various bric-a-brac needed to blow this problematic pop stand once and for all?
While it’s tough not to admit that Zack Snyder is one of the most divisive directors currently working, I have to say that until Sucker Punch I was actually pretty much fully on the filmmakers side. After all, Dawn Of The Dead was fantastic, 300 looked like nothing else before it, and it took undeniable balls to get Watchman to the screen even if you had issues with the way he accomplished it. However, without any sort of guiding source material to corral him in, Sucker Punch soon became proof that Snyder didn’t have that much to say other than dreamily rendered CGI backdrops, ridiculous amounts of slow motion and a music video sensibility that left any attempt at metaphor or profundity feeling about as deep as an empty sink. Worse yet, his decision to try and use a waking dream state to shoehorn in vastly elaborate fantasy/action mash-ups meant that Sucker Punch may be one of the most willfully illogical movies ever made and your mileage may vary depending on how much of Snyder’s pretentious posturing you can stand.
Obviously, Snyder has used the rickety framework of a character’s imagination to allow himself to go balls out on a world where conventional logic doesn’t apply, and there’s also the sense that he’s attempting to take the piss out of the absurdly sexualised female action heroes you’d find in Anime and Manga who can take out opponents five times their size while dressed in a questionably sexualised school uniform. But while Sucker Punch apes these tropes, it also doesn’t seem to have anything particularly meaningful say about them either and any sort of empowerment that’s supposed to be occurring is lost by the fact that Babydoll is made to imagine by the script that she and her friends are all reluctant whores when they aren’t fighting dragons in a B-52. Maybe the themes of the film would have stood our clearer if the film had more to offer than just “cool shit”, but regardless of whether you think Snyder manages to nail the narrative complexities or not (Daydreams within daydreams? How much disassociation can one film contain?), Sucker Punch ultimately fails in its task by making the most unforgivable blunder of all: it’s boring.
On paper, watching the gang of Emily Browning, Abbey Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung fight all manner of pulp era goons to moody covers of classic songs, should be a fucking home run. However, after watching Browning kick ass against three monstrous samurai to the strains of Björk’s “Army Of Me”, you soon start to realise that underneath the striking visuals lurks absolutely nothing whatsoever. None of the main characters resonate beyond being a blandly sexy, one-dimensional avatar, and the design aesthetic – which seems to want desperately blend The Matrix with Moulin Rouge! – is utterly incapable of holding the Fight Club-style mind fuckery together.
Rather than filming each level of Babydoll’s state of mind in a completely different style in order to differentiate how deep into her latest psychogenic fugue-world she is, Snyder films absolutely everything in that colour bleached, hyper stylised manner he went on to film everything else in. As a result everything blurs into a murky whole and even some plucky supporting roles populated by the likes of Oscar Issac, Carla Gugino and a cheerfully bemused Scott Glenn isn’t enough to add some much needed clarity. As we slog through sequence after sequence of soulless action sequences set to the slowed-down, mournful cover of a popular song, it eventually becomes tough to give a shit about anyone or anything, and while everything looks admittedly pretty, like Babydoll, we soon beg for release.
While Snyder’s visual talents can’t be denied, without a strong source material to rein him in, his unleashed enthusiasm results in an utter mess that shoots for stylish cool, but instead plays like an empty mess. Adolescent attempts at themes like female empowerment tend to fall flat when you dress your characters like sex objects and forget to add the irony – but in others ways, I totally get Sucker Punch 100%. It too made me want to disassociate…
Where to watch Sucker Punch: