14 DAY TRIAL // Critics have jumped on Zack Snyder’s latest brainchild, “Sucker Punch,” with more violence than vultures on roadkill because it’s superficial, dumb and exploitative. At the same time, fans are defending it like only fans would, calling it a subversive masterpiece, a cult classic like no other. Both are right – and both are wrong.
“Sucker Punch” marks the first original effort on Snyder’s part (he wrote the script with Steve Shibuya) but it is, in many ways, similar to his previous films “Watchmen” and “300,” in that it embodies the very essence of this filmmaker who is more of an artist than a film director.
If you ever wondered how Chris Nolan’s “Inception” on acid would be like, or how one could ever make a game watchable instead of playable, “Sucker Punch” is the answer.
The film opens with a long, monochrome scene that plays out like a music video for the reimagined “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, which is just as good, since the entire film is just that: a reimagination.
There’s a young woman, whom viewers will only know as Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who suffers a quadruple trauma in just the first 10 minutes of the film: her mother dies, she realizes she’s the one who must defend herself and her sister from their disgusting step-father, her sister is killed (by the same repulsive man), and she’s framed for the murder and thrown into a mental institution.
Like in comic books or video games, everything in Snyder’s world is either black or white: he makes zero efforts to render in-betweens, offering everything on a silver plate to viewers from the get-go.
Something can be either demoniacally bad or good, and the same goes for the characters. One look at their face is enough to tell you which is which.
After Baby Doll (who could very well be any manga character or video game heroine ever created) is locked away in the mental institution, she learns she will be lobotomized in 5 days, which means she has very little time to escape.
To do that, she creates reality number 2, where she reinvents herself as an orphan brought in to a brothel by the community’s priest, and where she’s to dance while waiting for the High Roller to make her a woman, you guessed it, in 5 days.
Blue (Oscar Isaac, an orderly in reality number 1) is the owner of the brothel and, of course, he’s hoping to make a fortune with Baby Doll, who will be, in the meantime, taught how to dance by Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), the stereotypical matron with a stern face but a golden heart.
Also here, we find four other girls: the always rational Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the impulsive Rocket (Jena Malone), the gorgeous Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and the tough Amber (Jamie Chung).
Whether they actually exist or they’re creations of Baby Doll’s mind matters very little. Their very existence as characters in the film is of no consequence, in that they’re easily interchangeable, with Snyder using them as he sees fit depending on the moment.
In reality number 2, Baby Doll discovers that her dancing can hypnotize men, which offers plenty of time to the other girls to carry out their bold escape plan.
As she dances, her mind creates a fantasy world to which no gamer is a stranger – and the only one she can control –, in which the five fighters (always with impeccable makeup, hair and outfits, guided by the only good male character, Scott Glenn’s Wise Man) counter and destroy Nazi zombies and robots, slay dragons, and carry out suicide mission from which they emerge (mostly) unscathed.
By surviving realities number 3 and 2, Baby Doll will escape the mental institution in reality number 1 – or, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory, but any Snyder fan should know better than to try and make (too much) sense of his vision.
Speaking of whom, it’s the final fantasy world that Snyder really lets his creative genius run amok, which is perhaps why critics have been so quick to describe the film as a geek’s wildest (verging on X-rated, almost) fantasy come true.
From a pure filmmaking perspective, the entire film is sheer brilliance: Snyder has a particular way of frame-freezing a character in mid-action to focus on a single, essential detail; or he puts the character at the forefront of the frame while the rest of the action happens somewhere in the background, almost blurry to the viewer; or he may be overcrowding the same scene with all the themes he can think of and still make it work; each reality has its own distinct color tone, even if it may not make much sense otherwise.
And this last part is precisely why critics couldn’t see “Sucker Punch” the same way fans see it: there are so many holes in the film that it’s almost hard (but not impossible) to overlook them.
The characters are stereotypes, the plot is a mere excuse for Snyder to show off his impressive skills (he’s a boy with toys), the dialog could very well lack altogether, while the acting leaves a lot to be desired.
In fact, the very idea of the film is flawed since it aims to be about female empowerment, while having every female character dressed in miniskirts and midriff-baring tops.
As a film (understood as “a connected cinematic narrative represented as a sequence of photographs projected onto a screen with sufficient rapidity as to create the illusion of motion and continuity”), “Sucker Punch” fails because of the reasons mentioned above.
As an experience, “Sucker Punch” is one of the best to date, confirming that, while he may still have a lot of work to do until he becomes a filmmaker, Snyder is a visual artist par excellence.
“Sucker Punch” is rated PG-13 for sensuality, violence and language. It opened in the US on March 25, is now playing in the UK, and will end its run in Japan and Turkey on April 15.
