Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: Zack Snyder, Steve Shibuya
Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Oscar Isaac, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn
What a blessed thing it must be to be utterly and completely crazy.
Young early 20-something Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is so blessed; though with a pretty heavy price. Her evil step father is a malicious abusing rapist, and in a fit of defensive rage she grabs a gun to shoot him, misses, and kills her own sister instead.
She's hauled off to the insane asylum in pretty short order. Her step-father - being quite interested in keeping his more sordid abuses private - bribes an orderly to arrange an expedited lobotomy of the girl. Baby Doll seems finished until the whole world snaps and we learn the last 15 minutes have been nothing but a stage play that's taking place in a 1950's brothel in some odd alternate universe.
But some things are similar. Baby Doll is 'fresh meat' in this new setting; the new girl who's been indoctrinated, by force, into the oppressive house of prostitution. The business is ruled by cruel dictator and super-pimp Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), who has no problem with murdering any girl who acts up. The girls must succeed in being entertaining, both on stage as dancers as well as in the back room for more private performances for their sleazy and rich clientele.
Baby Doll fashions some pretty early plans to escape the brothel, ideally before she actually has to endure any real whoring experience. Other girls in the troupe quickly sign up with her plan; all of them would love to bust out of the place and somehow get themselves home. Set out like goals in a video game, Baby Doll learns that she must accomplish five quests - map, fire, knife, key, and one mystery quest - in order to succeed breaking out of the place.
This sets up the main device of the film, and it's a bit of a strange one. Baby Doll is, apparently, a really wild dancer. Very wild. She can hypnotize an entire room with her dancing. She uses her dancing skills in order to do so, distracting their oppressors so the other girls can sneak around and accomplish their respective missions.
The funny thing is that we never, ever see her dance. There's another layer of crazy to Baby Doll; anytime she dances, she fantasizes of yet another world. While she dances, we see her do battle, armed with sword and pistol, with giant samurai gorgons, or perhaps Nazi zombies, or maybe flying in a 1950's era fighter plane dueling with a giant flame throwing dragon. Each of these montages are first introduced by a conversation with the "Wise Man" (Scott Glenn), who produces instructions and exposition for each sequence like a quest giver in World of Warcraft. The man might as well have a yellow exclamation point over his head.
When her mission is complete - whether it's by slaying the Nazi zombie general or killing the mighty dragon - the world snaps back to the stage, showing Baby Doll breathless and sweaty and the audience shouting adoring cheers.
It's a pretty unusual device, and these action sequences - which really are the entire 'meat' of the film - are colorful stuff. They're extremely frenetic, stylized, and very 'video game'. Imagine if the guy from The Devil May Cry was a scantily clad girl, but did all the same acrobatic moves with his pistol and gun; this is pretty much exactly what you get in Sucker Punch.
While these action sequences are fun to watch, they also fail to really have any real tension. It's all fantasy, after all - the film makes no secret of that. Nothing that happens in any of the long CGI frenzied action sequences is real. Given that it isn't real, we know that no one is in any danger, so it's hard to care. There is a moment when the dance doesn't quite work as expected and the girl's plan goes awry, and when this happens, the entire fantasy snaps back to the brothel. This means we know, as long as the 'fantasy' is moving forward, the escape plan taking place in the 'real' world of the brothel is still progressing. Where's the tension in that?
The end result is about the same emotional investment you might have in watching a long cutscene between the levels of your standard RPG video game. It's pretty to look at - but you never really feel any tension or will really care if anyone lives or dies. All of the young women are pretty much the same character, being "tragic pretty prostitute who wants to escape #1 through #5". Sucker Punch is what it is - a celebratory orgy of computerized tech effects blended with assorted colorful fantasy elements with lots of acrobatic gun-toting scantily clad women.
Beyond the thin characters and the overall lack of tension, perhaps the biggest failure of Sucker Punch is its utter lack of mystery. Guillermo del Toro's rather excellent Pan's Labyrinth also featured a tragic young protagonist who explored a realm of fantasy to escape her bitter reality. The difference is, by the end of Pan's Labyrinth we never really know the truth - was there really magic in the little girl's world, or was it just bittersweet fantasy? This unanswered question created a profound longing for the affirmative answer; that the fantasy world just might be another layer of reality, if only for the little girl's sake. That the question was never answered by the film is exactly what made it powerful.
The setup of Sucker Punch is very much the same thing. Young Baby Doll is a tragic character, and quite obviously has created this frenetic monster-filled fantasy to escape the horrors of her world. The difference is that Sucker Punch never even pretends that any of it could be real. It's all silly fantasy manifested by a disturbed mind; which means it can be written off and forgotten by the viewer. It's not magic. It's just delusion. There is no mystery, no caring, no soul, and no real passion; it's just a CGI frenzy of monsters, dragons, and machine guns dreamt of by a young girl with a lot of problems.
If you're beginning to think that I'm suggesting that Sucker Punch is a flawed film - you'd be right. It is a very flawed film. It's also easy to like in some strange way, though maybe not in the way Zack Snyder and company intended. If you took Showgirls, and stripped out all of the nudity and sex, and replaced it with dragons, giant samurai gorgons, and zombie Nazis then - well, you might just have something pretty damned close to Sucker Punch. I look forward to the drinking game.
This is a Day Two Review.
Rating: (2.5 out of 5):
Great review, Tristan. One of the more level-headed reviews I've read, after so many that just spew bile and hatred for the film.