Sucker Punch (2011)

Let’s say you took a roomful of the biggest geeks you could find and asked them to describe the coolest thing they could think off. You’d get ideas of steam-punk inspired, World War fighting Zombies, mechs and machine guns, Shogun warriors, sword-wielding robots, dragons and Orcs – all mixing it up with bad-ass, scantily clad chicks. And you’d also have the intense, over-stylized action scenes from Sucker Punch.

Though I’d heard that this movie was bad, I love Zack Snyder’s style enough to see it anyway. And though I admit that the movie fails in giving you a cohesive story and characters to care about, it does perk up my nerd-nipples. It’s worth sledging through the mush that is the story to get to what are essentially stand-alone vignettes.

The movie starts with an enigmatic and pretentious voice-over, and then we’re given an introduction to our main character, Baby Doll. With her mother and sister dead, her evil stepfather sends her to a loony bin, while he cashes in on the family fortune. This is all done in Snyder’s signature slo-mo style, with dramatic lighting and close-ups. While in the asylum, Baby Doll escapes to two different levels of her mind in an almost Inception-like way. We see Baby Doll and friends in a burlesque setting, and then a level deeper, in a variety of fantasy settings, where the girls have super-powers. Unlike Inception, however, it’s not really clear how one level affects another, there aren’t clear stakes, and even if there were, you don’t have enough of a connection to the characters in the real world to care about them in the “dream” world. As a narrative, the film doesn’t work. It’s mindless and shallow, which sticks out again the previously mentioned voice-over that bookends the film. However, that said – it’s still pretty awesome.

The fight scenes are really, really cool. And because they’re so completely detached from anything else going on, it doesn’t matter that nothing really makes sense. The music in these scenes, while sometimes a little too “on the nose”, for example using a cover of “Where is My Mind” when the girls drift into a mental fantasy land, juxtaposes nicely with the type of action on-screen and makes for a very effective soundtrack.

In short, Sucker Punch isn’t a good film. But it’s not a boring one either. …probably not worth paying for, but worth seeing, if you’re a geek like me.