Sucker Punch: First-Class Fiasco

Viewing Sucker Punch reminded me of an anecdote I once heard. The story goes something like this: a sampling of people are asked to name the one preeminent element that would be required to make the best painting in the world. One person mentions a beautiful landscape, another suggests a specific time of day, somebody else argues that a certain type of person should be included, yet another says that person should be doing a particular action, and so on and so forth.  And so it goes… that all the elements are compiled into one painting, shown to everyone who contributed, and it's unanimously agreed that the result is the worst painting in history, a convoluted jumble of disparate elements that ruin the whole rather than an eloquent mix that allows the sum to be greater than its parts.

Sucker Punch is essentially that. A disconnected pastiche of film elements favored by nerd-dom, Sucker Punch gives off the impression that Zack Snyder approached the writing of his screenplay with that very same mentality, only those he polled were 13-year old boys he met at Comic-Con.

After some opening voiceover that would be better off muted, we're introduced to the story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning), the film's protagonist, who finds herself on the receiving end of her stepfather's malice after her dead mother's will leaves everything to her and her sister. With some incredibly sharp camera work from DP Larry Fong, this minimalist prologue is all the film needs to invite us into the rest of the film: Baby Doll hates her stepfather, which results in the accidental death of her sister, which results in her being shipped off to Lennox House, the mental institution where she encounters the other sucker punchers.  Similar to his opening credit sequences in Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen, Snyder's intro for Sucker Punch is almost a separate short film in how efficiently and effectively it tells its own story. It's just a shame the rest of the movie has to spoil all that good will.

So Baby gets shipped off to Lennox, which is essentially Arkham Asylum with much more physically attractive clientele, permanently staffed by the benevolent Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), who helps the patients escape their pain through the creation of fantasy worlds, and the sadistic orderly, Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), who apparently wants to rape everybody, with sporadic visits from a doctor (Jon Hamm), who's might handy with an ice pick. A $2000 bribe from dear old dad ensures that 5 days later, Baby is strapped to a chair about to be made into a bleached blonde R.P. McMurphy when suddenly…

BAM!

…she shows her tenuous grasp on the word "escapism" by transporting herself to one of those aforementioned fantasy worlds in which she is no longer a patient in a mental institution, but the newest dancer in a brothel run by the mob. Blue has now become the club's sadistic owner and Gorski now the club's madame charged with teaching the young, prisoned flesh how to dance for their clients. It's here where Baby befriends some of the other dancers – Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and sisters Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Rocket (Jenna Malone) – and where she learns that in 5 days time, her virginity will be sold to a client called The High Roller (Hamm again). In order to handle this slightly less rapey brothel fantasy, Baby Doll uses her powers of literal hypnotic dance to further escape into fantasies where she and her friends have to collect 5 items – a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a mystery item – all of which have a real world (or is that fantasy world?) equivalent that will allow them to escape. 

But let's backtrack a bit to that first escape into fantasy, the one where we're transported from the lobotomy chair to the brothel, because that's the moment where Snyder effectively nullifies his entire script. I imagine Snyder would hope that this first moment would blur the line between fantasy and reality, but all it actually does is remove any semblance of consequences or risks from the rest of the film. If Baby Doll is strapped to that chair about to get lobotomized, what difference does it make if she collects those 5 items or not? 

It certainly has nothing to do with any type of character arch or protagonist's journey because the Baby Doll character is so painfully bland and hollow. Were it not for the blatant malevolence on display from the only two significant male characters in the film, there would be no reason to root for Baby Doll at all – we're told next to nothing about her and subsequently have next to no reason to care about anything she does. The fact that we're forced to root for her just because her stepfather and the orderly are such titanic caricatures of evil is an unfair and lazy tool of relation, and her emotional journey is far less effective than that of Sweet Pea's or Rocket's, both of whom are the only two characters that could be called three-dimensional and relatable.

Granted, the vast majority of people who want to see Sucker Punch are less interested in Zack Snyder's tenuous grasp of character and direction of actors and more interested in his patented action set pieces. Admittedly, many of them are quite fantastic in their choreography – the trench warfare sequence in which the girls flip-flop between fisticuffs and gun play in tight quarters is particularly thrilling and easy to follow. But even if all the action set pieces were thrilling and didn't reek of CGI saturation, they'd still be the sharpest looking distractions you'll see at the movies all year. The only reason the overblown, incongruous set pieces exist in the first place is to make the audience forget that the tasks in which Baby Doll and her friends are partaking are INCREDIBLY BORING. Find a map, find a lighter, find a knife, find a key – does that sound interesting to any of you? Of course not. It doesn't sound interesting to Zack Snyder either, which is why he concocts these anachronistic fantasies in which the girls have to fight through giant samurai, orcs, steampunk zombie Nazis, and robots to achieve their goals. And that would be fine except for the fact that the only reason they're fantasizing about being scantily clad super feminists is because Baby Doll is first fantasizing about being a slave in a brothel. Why not forego that first fantasy and just jump from the asylum to the flying robots shooting down WWI zeppelins? Why does he go through so much effort to complicate what is at its core a very simple story?

It's as though Snyder has seen Inception or Tarantino films but has completely missed the point as to what made them tick. He's packed as many genres and levels of reality he could into one film and still make it coherent, but he hasn't made it cohesive. His imagination and references serve to enhance the style of Sucker Punch, but greatly distract from its narrative. It's got explosions, it's got guns, it's got swords, it's got zombies, it's got robots, but it's completely devoid of any soul or logic. But if you're a 13-year old boy, what good do either of those do you when you've got a scantily clad Emily Browning?