When watching Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, about midway through, you’ll realize something is missing. There’s a vacuum, devoid of meaning and purpose. What is it? What can it be? It’s heart, emotion - Sucker Punch has no soul. Without that, there’s no connection to the characters, no investment in the plot, no payoff to the story. Snyder plays to his strengths, the visuals, the style, but forgets to add an appropriate amount of substance. It’s a shame - there’s brilliance in there somewhere, struggling to bubble to the surface. Buried in the excess is a magnificent concept of a fantasy in a fantasy in a fantasy with bold narrative choices and a clever visual style, but it is all squandered by losing focus on the characters themselves. It’s all flash, fancy and fury and no depth.
Set in the 50’s, Sucker Punch quickly follows a young woman named Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who is sent to a mental hospital by her sleazy step-father after the death of her mother and the accidental shooting of her younger sister. Locked inside the Lennox House, Baby Doll must find a way to escape before she is lobotomized in five days. She teams up with four other inmates, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung), to gather four items needed to execute their escape. Baby Doll learns of these four items when she falls into a fantasy world as she dances for Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino) - itself, a fantasy world set up to escape the horrors of living in the institution. However, the evil orderly, Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), discovers their plot and confronts them exposing and jeopardizing their escape.
Sucker Punch is visually stunning with exciting vignettes set in Feudal Japan, a steam-punk version World War I, a blend of World War II and Lord of the Rings and a futuristic, sci-fi mission impossible on a train. This is where the magic happens, in the hyper-stylised, anime-influenced action sequences set to trippie rock classic remakes on the soundtrack where the girls are little more than costumed superheroes. Baby Doll fights a trio of giant Samurais or the girls battle an army of zombified steam-punk German soldiers or a vicious pissed-off mother dragon. The scenes are spectacular and stunning. They’re visual eye-candy of the highest order. They’re meant to be heightened reflections of the tasks at hand, mirroring the capture of each item in Baby Doll’s fantasy world within her fantasy world. Unfortunately, they mean very little to the story and, despite their visual appeal, the scenes detract from the impact of the story itself.
Oddly, the fantasy sequences occur as Baby Doll dances - and are shown instead of the dance itself. We’re told Baby Doll’s dancing is mesmerizing, beautiful, hypnotic. No one can look away - except Zack Snyder it seems. The director never shows Baby Doll dancing and the audience never witnesses the dance - instead we get the fantasy sequences. This a crucial mistake. While it may have been intended that the spectacular set pieces would represent her seductive performances, they complete remove the audience from the effect. Instead that draw, the fascination, is never effectively established and the scenes are left hollow and incomplete. It just happens. It’s as if right when Baby Doll gets ready to perform her spectacular dance number Dug from Disney’s Up jumps onto screen announcing “squirrel” and then we follow that damn squirrel on it’s adventure instead. It’s a wondrous and fascinating misstep of glorious proportions.
In the past ten years, Zack Snyder has proven he has a keen visual eye for producing stunning and satisfying cinematographic mini-masterpieces. He first wowed with the opening scenes in the remake of Dawn of the Dead with Ana’s harrowing escape from the zombies invading her suburban life. Then he transformed action scenes for all action movies with his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 with his jerky-mixed-speed motion fight sequences. He followed that up with filming the unfilmable graphic novel Watchmen giving the whole world a sample of Alan Moore’s genius. With each film, he matured as a filmmaker. Somehow that maturity didn’t translate to Sucker Punch. The style and the pizazz did, but not the attention to detail, plot and character. There’s no tie to Baby Doll, there’ no emotional bond or investment to her character or her plight. Worse, in the end, her entire story is rendered pointless. With no cause to care for the characters, the action scenes lose their sizzle - they lose their punch! Sucker Punch is a dazzling epic disaster.
2.5 out of 5
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