Snyder Swings Big and Misses with Sucker Punch

Director Zack Snyder has proven himself to be two things 1) an incredible visual stylist with an exceptional talent for shooting action and 2) one of geek culture’s leading filmmakers. Snyder first broke out in 2004 with the Dawn of the Dead remake, a film that turned skeptical horror fans into raving devotees hungry for more. He went on to adapt graphic novels (the gorgeous and gory 300 and the underappreciated Watchmen) and children stories (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole). Sucker Punch is Snyder’s first crack at an original idea, one of his own devising.

The film opens with a theater stage, the curtains pulled back to reveal Babydoll (Emily Browning), a porcelain-skinned 20 year-old blonde in pigtails. Her mother recently died, leaving her and her unnamed sister under the care of a monstrous stepfather who’s after the deceased’s fortune. Babydoll accidentally kills her sister while trying to protect her from their stepfather’s malicious intentions and is promptly sent to an institution. Bear in mind, this story takes place back when mental institutions occasionally cured everything from homosexuality to rebellion with a strike of a pick to the frontal lobe. In fact, that’s exactly the fate Babydoll is soon faced with.

Here’s where the film gets tricky: just before Babydoll’s lobotomy – which occurs only ten minutes into the film, for those who are spoiler-averse – we are transported into a second reality, one existing in Babydoll’s mind, where the institution becomes a 1940s club full of under-the-table gambling and backstage whoring. Babydoll’s fellow patients (played by Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung) join her in a plot to obtain four items that will aide in an escape to freedom. To do so, Babydoll must distract key male characters that stand in their way by dancing for them. Apparently, Babydoll is quite an alluring dancer, but we only see her dances represented by a third level of reality within Babydoll’s mind wherein she and her team slay dragons, defeat WWI zombies, and defuse bombs powerful enough to cripple an entire city.

At this point, you may have gone cross-eyed and be asking, “Wha?”

Sucker Punch is intended as this year’s mind-blowing thinking-man’s spectacle, like Inception, only geekier and with cooler action. The problem is where Inception succeeded at coherence without pandering to the audience, Sucker Punch fails. There is nothing that grounds us to the core reality, especially since we don’t see that reality again until the last ten minutes of the movie. Majority of the film takes place within the second reality – the first that exists in Babydoll’s mind – but we are never clued in to how it relates to the core reality, aside from some vague revelations near the film’s end.

Yet it is not a dumb movie. Snyder is clearly reaching for something with substance and he gets points for not treating his audience like idiots by not spelling things out too much. However, he succeeds a bit too well in that regard; thereby failing to help us make sense out of the story’s premise. As a result Sucker Punch is what would happen if someone were to combine the sensibilities of David Lynch and Michael Bay.

Here’s the thing: the film opens with rouge curtains being drawn from a stage and just as Babydoll is about to receive her lobotomy minutes later, we are cut to an interrupted stage rehearsal. Sucker Punch is full of theatrics that we are pulled in and out of, missions that are part of a larger plan and are fantastic representations of one of three realities existing simultaneously. Therefore, we have a pretty good hunch that the entire film from the moment of the lobotomy is a fantasy, a performance, which exists only in Babydoll’s mind. This is a set-up that is both full of intriguing possibilities and dangerous narrative traps. For one thing, if everything we are witness to potentially occurs only in someone’s mind then we need something to help us trust it, otherwise we’ll have a hard time caring about anything that happens to the character within that reality because we’ll know it isn’t real. Snyder fails to sidestep this issue and that’s a big problem.

Also, if the story exists only in Babydoll’s mind then she can’t be privy to anything that happens without her presence. Again, Snyder strolls right into this trap.

Zack Snyder isn’t an idiot. His films may be heavy on stylized action, but they contain more intelligence than most action films. You’ve gotta have something going on upstairs in order to pull off something like Watchmen or to attempt some of the concepts in Sucker Punch. So, it’s a bit disappointing that he fails to keep his ideas tight and logical – even if they exist within the mind of a character. Last year, Inception showed us that even world-building of the mind has to make sense within a story – and it accomplished that by adhering to certain rules. There are very few rules in Sucker Punch.

Make no mistake: this film has a lot of problems and because of that it will be one of the year’s biggest disappointments. But I contend there is too much here to admire for one to spit and kick dirt on it, as majority of the critical community has done. Snyder is attempting something great. He stumbles in big ways, but that only proves he’s yet to become the master storyteller of someone like Christopher Nolan. However, he’s clearly spent the past thirty years (he cited Heavy Metal as initial inspiration) grasping at saying something about self-empowerment.

That’s actually where things get a bit sticky with this film. The internet has been lit up like northern California in the summer with a firestorm of controversy around Sucker Punch. Is the film female empowerment or exploitative male fantasy? Now, there are those who are way more articulate than me that have written about this issue. I will say that I find the latter to be an argument presented largely by those who’ve jumped at dismissing the film and probably weren’t exactly fans of Zack Snyder’s films to begin with. It’s clear, having seen the film that Snyder is attempting more than just exploitation. Yes, it could be said this team of female bad-asses look sexy when they’re kicking robot butt or whatever the mission requires. However, those missions exist purely in the mind of a female character; therefore she is the one projecting her own concept of how an ass-kicking heroine looks, not the male characters. Furthermore, in the beginning of the film, we see the women dressed in drab, frumpy outfits in the institution. They are not sexualized or inherently exploited by Snyder. As a matter of fact, the men in the film are almost uniformly depicted as despicable and malicious. Snyder is clearly presenting a terrible situation from which we are to root for the girls’ escape – not revel or take pleasure in their imprisonment. To argue otherwise simply because of what the characters are wearing in an internalized fantasy of one’s mind, no matter how dimensional the characters are depicted, is preposterous.

In a way, this film could’ve been cast with men instead of women. The fact that the story is shaped around women is refreshing, because it not only adds extra juice to the ‘breaking free from oppression’ story, but also adds to the girls-can-kick-ass-in-movies truism that studios still somehow repeatedly question. Not only that, but we’ve seen plenty of movies where the male heroes are fighting their way through baddies with bulging, muscular bodies in full view (300, anyone?). To argue that we can’t have a film where women are kicking ass while looking sexy one way or another without it being exploitative or morally questionable is to perpetuate the same attitudes the argument claims to be railing against.

Be that as it may, Sucker Punch was made for geek culture – both guys and gals – by a guy who is clearly in love with geek culture. In one film we have elements of science fiction, fantasy, steam punk, martial arts, mission-based action, and zombies. Did you ever wish the Fellowship could just take a semi-automatic to those pesky Oriki? Or that a WWII-era bomber would be in a dogfight with a dragon? Then this film was made for you. It is an insane geek mash-up.

Zack Snyder has attempted to make a high-brow action film that mainstream eye-candy-chasing moviegoers could consume. It could have been his Inception. Unfortunately, he failed to iron out his narrative’s logic, making sure each fantasy he presents is anchored by the story’s reality. Sucker Punch may go down by conventional wisdom as one of the year’s biggest failures. It is certainly a disappointment, but will also be one of the year’s most ambitious films. Snyder should be commended on his attempt to bring us something more than a formulaic and brainless action film and delivering some extraordinary visuals and ideas – not to mention making a film that’s sparked so much discussion. It is one of those rare films that is extremely problematic, but has enough to offer to still be worth your time.


5/10

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Sucker Punch is in theaters now and available in IMAX.