Sucker Punch
The year is 1945 and World War II is not how it was remembered. In the Pacific, the Japanese have magically imbued 15 foot statues of samurai to brutalize the Chinese while their undead and clockwork Nazi allies in Europe wage war against the Allies in the trenches. Codename: Sucker Punch, a secret Allied project of five genetically and cybernetically modified super women use their deadly skill in combat and their sexual wiles to access the highest levels of security and destroy the Axis from within. However, when interpersonal conflict gets between the women will their greatest enemy be themselves? Or can they put aside their petty differences and achieve victory? An incredibly stupid plot, yes, but unfortunately not the one in the actual movie Sucker Punch. The actual story is far stupider and far less fun. I wrote that paragraph in I dunno, 10 mins. Director Zach Snyder must have spent a lot less time on his story, and probably with one hand in his pants. Well he had a co-writer so maybe he was using both.
The actual plot seems less than a serious effort to make a story and more like an Inception meme. Baby Doll (Emily Downing), yes that is her name, arrives in a mental institution which quickly becomes a fantasy reality of a bordello where women are held captive and forced to be whores. The villain of the piece is Mr. Blue (Oscar Isaac), a rather creepy ethnic pimp that terrorizes and objectifies the women relentlessly. In fact, nearly all the men in this movie are ugly creeps. Fat ones, old ones, greasy Cuban ones, whatever. John Hamm shows up towards the end with his chiseled good looks and I mock wonder briefly why he isn’t a disgusting creep too (he’s handsome, you can’t be creepy and handsome), but by then the movie’s nearly over and there’s so much fail in this thing that the fact that nearly all the men in it are creeps is just one of the minor things wrong with it. It’s almost like Snyder set out to make an exploitative, sexist, knuckle-dragging male fantasy and to apologize for it he just depicts men as slobbering, hopeless creeps and calls it feminism. Good work dude, you missed the point.
One of the few exceptions to this is the Wise Man (Scott Glenn), the father figure (of course) that briefs the unit of girls in the action sequences which are the third level of Baby Doll’s fantasy or whatever that’s going on here. Baby Doll’s so sexy, right, that if she dances for men she will basically entrance them as if she was some kind of pale blonde siren with tassels on her nipples. The plan is that while the male is entranced by her tits, one of the other girls get one of the four items that they need to escape from the bordello. These four things are always conveniently concealed about the person of the creepy male. However, instead of showing Baby Doll dancing, we zoom in on her face and Snyder cuts to video game boss fights that are not unlike what I described above in my brief plot outline. The action is sort of fun and stupid as hell in an exuberant way but it still lacks the earnest knowing goofiness of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which is an example of a stupid movie that’s actually fucking awesome.
Sucker Punch is one of the most sexist movies made in probably a decade, and that’s saying a lot because there’s an Entourage movie on the way and Sex in the City 2 came out last year. It’s not the sexy outfits and the bizarre action sequences that do it. I actually think those are fine because it shows women displaying strength, courage, power and yes, sexuality. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who denies that super heroes aren’t intentionally depicted as being sexually prime is fooling themselves, and super heroines should display the same kind of sexual power. I won’t deny that super heroines always toe that line between sexist and feminist, but it depends on who is writing and/or drawing them. This movie utterly fails as a feminine empowerment piece, as I’ve read Snyder call it, because the women in it as a universal whole are utterly incapable of dealing with any sort of emotional distress without sobbing like children. Practically every single moment that isn’t a fight scene is filled with girls crying and hugging in their panties in front of dressing room mirrors. I expected panties and hugging but I wasn’t expecting moist eyes with inch long eyelashes dripping tears every 10 minutes.
The drama scenes are especially torturous because the characters do not evolve much beyond being unhappy attractive women. There are five girls, but two of them (the vaguely ethnic tokens, to boot) are so completely underwritten that they’re almost used as accessories to the main blonde entourage of Baby Doll, Rocket (Jena Malone), and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Cornish does the best she can with the material, being the strong one which means the negative one, I guess, Jena Malone chews scenery, sobbing and crying almost constantly as I’m sure she was directed to, and Emily Browning just kind of stands around and pouts sexily with her collagen lips. She mewls a whine every now and again which I guess is supposed to be her personality. So, you want to write a feminist empowerment piece Mr. Snyder? You should probably start with giving your sexy dolls some kind of personality. Maybe you should have a talk with Joss Whedon, he tends to write super heroines that women actually like. Towards the end of the film, Blue is pressing Baby Doll against the wall and he sneers, “I feel like a little boy in the sand box, watching as everyone else plays with my toys.” He became a stand in for the director at that point, as I felt Blue’s presence is a truer reflection of the motives for this flick than any bullshit about feminism.
Truly this is a putrid piece of shit, already. People will say the visuals are a positive but I disagree. Snyder’s grunge-vision shaky cam slow mo style is already dated. I have to reference the exuberance of color in Scott Pilgrim, and that is something this film desperately lacks. It’s what a lot of action movies these days lack. Everything is washed out, brown on grey on black, even the girls themselves don’t pop with any sort of color or emergency. Worse still, the fight scenes utilize a lot of shaky cam and in the end are confusing, disorienting and a chore to watch. When the girls fight steam powered clockwork Nazis, the camera shakes as if I was there, but that’s retarded because this movie has nothing to do with realism. Shaky cam has to stop. It was incredible in Children of Men, we all know that. But that movie was so realistic it could have been directed by Herzog (it wasn’t, it was the esteemable and incredible Alfonso Curaon), and the shaky cam tracking shots were part of the war documentary immediacy that lent power to that film. A movie that involves bad ass super heroines fighting clockwork Nazis, giant stone samurai and orcs does not need shaky cam. It needs professional style and panache; ridiculous camera angles, digital post production techniques, break the concept of how films are “supposed” to present a story and go straight for unabashed comic book style. You know, like Scott Pilgrim.
I mention Scott Pilgrim a lot because it’s a pretty stupid movie that takes risks, presents the material with color, action, and humor and doesn’t take itself seriously for much of one instant, even ruining its own poignant moments with jokes. It’s a delight. It was what I was hoping for more of. Sucker Punch seems to want you to take the dramatic element of it seriously, but due to the lack of any human levity lent to any single one of the characters it fails utterly. The best you can call jokes in this thing is the silly catch phrases that the Wise Man ends his briefings with. Children of Men is a very dark, bleak film but has more humor in it than Sucker Punch–outside of the ludicrous fight scenes. This underscores the reason why the fight sequences ultimately fail; when a bi-plane piloted by some kind of undead steampunk Nazi crashes into a Zeppelin, exploding it in an enormous fireball or a 15 foot samurai statue opens fire with a minigun I think the audience should be expected to laugh, but because of the humorless “story” there was nary a chuckle in the house. I almost felt embarrassed on behalf of Snyder. But then I remembered that Snyder has an opportunity of a lifetime that he’s using for this and then I just figure, well fuck him.
What’s good? Uh. Well, the girls are really pretty. I especially like the fact that the main cast are all Hollywood PYTs but the older Carla Gugino is still just as truck-stoppingly gorgeous as ever. I was entirely amused by the ludicrous 15 foot samurai fight but when I realized the rest of the movie was going to be crying scene/action scene/crying scene/action scene it wasn’t as awesome any more. Abbie Cornish honestly puts on the best performance of any of the girls, dealing with the script and soldering on as best she can like a real professional. I might be a little generous here since I found her to be the most gorgeous, too. Oscar Isaac is perfectly disgusting, creepy and weird, but still manages to have some greaser suaveness about him. It’s actually a decent performance given how stereotypical and vaguely racist his character is. There’s a part where the girls steal a map and he figures this out because he discovers the map now has two tack holes. That’s a pretty high level of intelligence than is usually displayed by a villain in a POS movie, but at the same time there’s no explanation why there are two maps now.
The music is comprised mostly of glossy, female vocalized covers of noise rock classics like Search and Destroy by the Stooges, Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles (sung by Allison Fucking Mossheart) and Where Is My Mind by the Pixies. This tickled my earballs because I’m a sucker for thrash noise with female vocals as well as combining music with over-the-top fight scenes, but I wonder why he couldn’t use the original songs or pick up some actual female fronted thrash noise (or pick up a less obvious Pixies song, but c’est la vie). Of course, Sleater-Kinney, the reigning queens of noise, wouldn’t sell the rights to any of their songs to score this sexist garbage.
Other than that, it’s really hard to pick something out that’s good about this thing. I’d compliment the exuberant imagination at work in the action scenes but because of the human drama, it is compromised. It’s a huge mess, and has an Inception gimmick tacked onto it, probably after Snyder saw Inception and shit his pants. I really disliked Inception too, but it made more sense than this movie and Inception didn’t make a whole lot of sense. We need to go deeper, people.
Grade: D.
