Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone
Directed by: Zack Snyder
“YOU WILL BE UNPREPARED”
This is the tagline for Sucker Punch, and rarely has a tagline spoken the gospel truth like this one has. To be honest I really didn’t know what to prepare myself for when I decided to watch Sucker Punch. Sure the reviews weren’t very good for it, but sometimes I just make up my mind that I want to watch a movie, critics be damned. What I wasn’t prepared for while watching Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch was that everything was a contradiction. Yes, I was certainly unprepared.
The film starts off well enough. We are quickly introduced to “Baby Doll” as we see her mother dying. Soon after, the evil step-father comes into the picture, apparently quite upset that only Baby Doll and her little sister were listed in the will. Evil step-father takes out his aggression with some unwanted sexual advances towards Baby Doll and then little sister. Baby Doll fights back, accidentally kills her little sister instead, and is sent to an insane asylum full of attractive girls where evil step-father has paid off an orderly to make sure to make sure that Baby Doll gets a lobotomy. All this happens during the opening credits. The rest of the film exists primarily in a fantasy word that Baby Doll has conjured up as a way to deal with her current hardships.
So let’s talk about those contradictions now. First, if you have seen any of the posters for this film, you know that it was designed with young men in mind. The film has been filled to the brim with nubile young girls who manage to wear next to nothing for the entire length of the film. Yet somehow Snyder has made Sucker Punch a very unsexy movie. Maybe this is because each one of the girls is a generic representation of a 12 year old’s wet dream. Perhaps the eye can’t focus on their beauty because it is too distracted by the blemish that is the entirely computer generated world that Snyder vomited onto the screen. Tough to say.
Next up we need to talk about the length of the film. Most sites I looked at listed this movie at being between 110-120 minutes. This is also incorrect…kind of. The movie is only about 45 minutes long, but managed to reach the two hour mark by adding obscene amounts of slow motion shots. Big gun battles in slow motion, that’s cool. Sword fights in slow motion, that’s not too bad. Walking around in slow motion…err…okay. Water moving towards a drain on the floor in slow motion?! You have got to be fucking kidding! I think the credits rolling were the fastest thing to happen in this movie.
Finally, I want to talk about the main component of this film, the reason that I decided to spit in the face of countless critics and give Sucker Punch a chance, the action. I like mindless action movies, and this movie seemed to fit that bill quite nicely. Sucker Punch has German zombie robots hell bent on destruction, dragons fighting a WWII bomber plane, a sword fight between a girl and three giant samurai statues, alien robots riding a runaway train with a bomb on it, and a prison break. In spite of all that Sucker Punch was soooo boring. The action becomes tedious and lazily tries to move the story along. The constant sound of everything exploding became a white noise that was almost lulling me to sleep.
I don’t know how things went as wrong as they did while Sucker Punch was being made. I still believe that Zack Snyder can make a good movie, but you wouldn’t know by watching this one. It makes me nervous about giving him the reigns to the next Superman movie, but I will remain hopefully optimistic. Maybe I should be grateful that I had a pass to see this movie, but that brings me to my final contradiction; while I did manage to see this movie for free…my god did I pay.
Written by Drew Martin