Film Review | Sucker Punch

Like Rebecca Black’s much-maligned but stratospherically famous single ‘Friday’, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch exists in a vacuum of meaning and substance. It is bolstered up, largely, by digital visuals – gimmicky 3D reaches its apotheosis here – and derivative imagery… with little to no connecting plot threads to keep the entire mess together.

And just like Black’s paean to Fridays – UK entertainment-industry pundit and comedian Charlie Brooker called it “possibly the world’s first song with less than one note” – it bolstered buzz and notoriety purely through its aesthetic and moral hollowness. Capitalising on borderline-underage girls wearing skimpy outfits, with a plot propelled by male chauvinist abuse (and a constant threat of rape), it has attracted the ire of not just oversensitive loony feminists.

As someone who’s wary of any form of political correctness – particularly when it comes to very obvious genre pastiches such as this one – what I found most shocking as the lumbering mess drew to a close is the fact that I found absolutely no problem chiming in with the indignant mob.

A young girl (Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning) is locked away in a mental asylum by her abusive stepfather where she will undergo a lobotomy in five days’ time.

She retreats to a fantastical world in her imagination where she and four other female inmates at the asylum plot to escape the facility. The lines between reality and fantasy blur as Baby Doll and her four companions – as well as a mysterious guide (Scott Glenn) – fight to retrieve the five items they need that will allow them to break free from their captors before it’s too late.

Making a film aimed squarely at 14-year-old boys is all well and good, but if it feels like it’s also made by a 14-year-old, you’ve got a bit of a problem, methinks. Snyder’s previous efforts (300, Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead and, somewhat the odd one out, Legend of the Guardians) were all adaptations or remakes, and having sat through his first attempt at a non-derivative story, it’s not that hard to see why.

Not only is Sucker Punch a patchwork of comic-book, film, video-game and anime influences – and I stress that I find absolutely nothing wrong with this: Tarantino’s career would not exist without such an approach, and it was one of the reasons I was actually looking forward to Sucker Punch – it is also giddily put together in a way that would be intriguing were it not so inept.

A fundamental problem is the sloppily presented conceit. We are given no real explanation for Baby Doll’s lapses into the fantasy worlds, save for the lazy: “it’s all in her head because she’s crazy so anything’s possible.”

This robs the film of any real urgency because unlike more carefully put together works in the sci-fi/fantasy genre (like, say, The Matrix), there are no real ground rules to follow, so we don’t know how exactly the characters in the ‘real’ world will be affected by their adventures in the parallel worlds.

Of course, the fact that Snyder insists on over-directing each shot with glossy MTV-style edits doesn’t help his case in the slightest. The film is supposedly set in the 50s, but smothered as the film is with loud, videogame-y visuals throughout, you only notice in the last few shots, when the worst has passed, and when you’re free to go home.

Next week: Pirates of the Caribbean!