Review: Sucker Punch (2011)

Trying to categorize the indefinable is certainly no easy task with Sucker Punch's anarchic fantasy backdrops, overt sexuality and rigid brutality, but at the end of the day, this is really just another Zack Snyder film full of slow-mo comic-book slop set to highly questionable musical choices.

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Co-writing his first original screenplay, the film is a top-class geek-off session of the highest order - an untamed, uninhibited sideshow of Nazi zombies, skimpy miniskirts and stockings, dragons, zeppelins, gunplay and samurai swords. 

Inspired by and taking the shape of classic fantasy tales like The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland (a re-worked version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" plays over a few fight scenes in case you didn't get the connection), the film is (in reality) set in the dim, scummy corridors of an insane asylum, yet projected into a slightly upscale brothel setting and further into whatever genre backdrop (WWI, medieval, shogun, futuristic) that Baby Doll (Emily Browning) - or more pointedly, Zack Snyder - can cook up. 

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Whenever Baby Doll is forced to dance, we follow her as she transitions to the double-fantasy state, which occurs every time the girls need one of the five items required to escape the brothel, or rather, the asylum. (Map, key, knife, fire, etc.)

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My biggest gripe with the film - other than the fact that it's generally emotionless and conceptually flawed - is that Snyder's fantasyland settings are as excessively haphazard as they are blatantly simple. (Contrary to what people are saying, Sucker Punch isn't incoherent at all, just merely mute.)

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So eager to whip around in his gas-mask trenches (admittedly rather cool) and cliff-side castles (admittedly not) is Snyder that he forgets to (or rather is incapable of) telling a story that you can feel and latch on to and become a part of. 

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So far through four features, he's a director who has routinely exhibited his technical prowess behind the camera (and the way his films pop and flourish visually should not be ignored), while concurrently proving that he has no pulse for convincing storytelling whatsoever. Sucker Punch, like his two previous efforts, is a story better served on the page, told by illustrations. [C]