REVIEW: Sucker Punch

Dawn of the Dead.  300.  Watchmen.  The Owls of Ga'Hoole.   These are the four major films Zach Snyder has previously directed, and they all have something in common: they're adaptations.  300 and Watchmen were originally graphic novels, Ga'Hoole was inspired by a popular young adult book series, and Dawn of the Dead was, of course, based off of the 1978 original.  Snyder's unique visual style helped bring these adaptations to life onscreen in a way no one else could have.  His talent lies in presentation and adaptation, not original storytelling.  So what, you might ask, is Zach Snyder doing with a screenwriting credit in his latest film, Sucker Punch?  I'd like to know that myself right about now.

I can only assume this movie was named for what you want to do to the ticket vendor when you walk out of the theater.

On paper, Sucker Punch sounds like an ideal template for Snyder to work his slo-mo action magic: a young girl nicknamed Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is wrongly committed to an all-female insane asylum by her evil step-father, where she retreats into worlds of her own imagining in order to devise an escape plan.  The problem is, what could have been an intense exploration of the power of imagination turns out to be four incredible action set pieces that are each bookend-ed by coma-inducing exposition scenes that reach new levels of cinematic ineptitude.

What the movie trailers don't tell you about this film is that Baby Doll's imagination doesn't take her straight from the asylum into the action sequences that represent her escape.  Instead of imagining a world that makes her feel powerful and in control, Baby Doll mentally retreats from the asylum by imagining it to be a burlesque house where she and the other women are routinely whored out to patrons by the business's abusive owner (Oscar Isaac).  How exactly is being an unwillingly prostitute a better situation than being trapped in an insane asylum?  Sure doesn't seem like a comfortable daydream to me.  Snyder himself said that this film is an examination of female exploitation in a completely non-exploitative way.  I'm not even going to try and illustrate how many ways that isn't true.

Anyway, in this fantasy burlesque house, all the women are trained to perform sultry dances; when Baby Doll is forced to dance, we get treated to an Inception-esque shift into a second level of fantasy- Baby Doll's dance is represented by a snowy scene where she battles ten-foot-tall samurai warriors that wield gatling guns.  I kid you not.

Before the battle, Baby Doll is told by a mysterious old man her brain made up that she needs to collect four items to escape the asylum.  The rest of the movie follows this formula: Baby Doll "dances" (insert random action sequence here) to distract oafish asylum workers while the other girls steal the items she needs.  But wait... if the action scenes represent her dancing in the burlesque house, what does her dancing represent in the real-life asylum?

We hardly see anything about her actual life in the asylum- the entire "plot" unfolds in the burlesque house.  However, since that scenario isn't real, I didn't care about what happened to any of the characters.  Why couldn't the action scenes just be a symbol for what she did in the asylum itself?  Why did the burlesque house have to be in the movie at all?  Everything is overly complicated, especially considering that the dialogue is written with the subtlety of a... well, of a ten-foot-tall-gatling-gun-toting samurai. 

Yes, the action scenes are impressive and imaginative, and they wowed me in a way that cg effects hardly ever do anymore.  But with a director-written script as lazy, convoluted, and downright awful as Sucker Punch's, there's no reason to care about anything that's happening.  Thankfully, Zach Snyder's next film, Superman: Man of Steel, is a return to what he does best: riding to success on the shoulders of pre-existing intellectual properties.