Dissociative escapism. Those two words sum up Sucker Punch from its earliest conception to its closing twist. They also, very likely, sum up the wishful sentiments of everyone who sat through it on the opening weekend.
After a nonsensical introduction about guardian angels, which makes the Transformers narration (“Before time began, there was the cube…”) sound like the best of Faulkner, director Zack Snyder begins his first completely original film with what feels like a music video.
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Sucker Punch Directed by Zack Snyder Starring Emily Browning, Scott Glenn, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Carla Gugino, Vanessa Hudgens, Jon Hamm |
In an extended, wordless sequence set to a cover of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” Baby Doll (Emily Browning) and her younger sister lose their mother and then the inheritance she left them when their sadistic stepfather attempts to ravish Baby Doll and has her institutionalized when she resists. This leads to the death of her sister.
It’s atmospheric, hyperbolic, insubstantial, and rife with cliché – and that’s just the first scene, though it sets the tone for what follows.
Awaiting a lobotomy her conniving stepfather has illegitimately arranged for her, Baby Doll retreats into a fantasy world analog to the institution, plunging into dreams within dreams in a manner that invites comparison to Inception – but that would be doing an enormous disservice to Christopher Nolan.
The first level of escape is a strip club populated by lurid caricatures of towering, predatory men and cowering, victimized women, in which Baby Doll and her fellow inmates/strippers Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) have five days before Baby Doll will be sold for her virginity. How this is a more comfortable alternative to the asylum is anybody’s guess.
But Baby Doll gives the girls their first hope for a chance at freedom with her inexplicable ability to mesmerize those watching when she dances, simultaneously sending her own consciousness winging through another rabbit hole to the second level down (to borrow Inception terminology), where a proverb-spouting Wise Man (Scott Glenn) gives her a checklist and sends her off to battle clockwork zombie Nazis, castle-dwelling dragons, and CGI robo-rejects from I, Robot in a series of lushly designed, computer-generated worlds.
Because they are sealed away in Baby Doll’s imagination, these eye-popping adventures have no bearing on anything else – and therefore no tension to them. They do, however, correspond to the scavenger hunt the girls in the strip club are performing in preparation for an escape attempt, stockpiling a map, a knife, a key and other necessities while Baby Doll distracts the men with her dancing.
It’s as if Snyder wanted to share his own take on The Lord of the Rings, a Terminator film, and Call of Duty (in zombie mode with added steampunk trappings) and crammed it into a single, ponderous behemoth of a movie, lacking coherence and leaking solder as it creaks along toward its telegraphed finale.
The clunky over-use of music that dogged Watchmen has been dialed up here instead of toned down. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and the Pixies’ “Where is my Mind” (both reincarnated as nu-metal covers) underscore scenes in such a way as to attest to Snyder’s belief in a rule about drowning audiences aurally in songs with lyrics that expound further upon what is already overwhelming their retinas (sadly, he missed the “not” after “thou shalt”).
And lest anyone claim otherwise, this is not female empowerment; it’s just equal opportunity. Live-action Sailor Moon can be every bit as big, loud and dumb as The Expendables – Snyder has proven it beyond any shadow of a doubt – but seeing the Powerpuff Girls transformed into waifish, mascara-ridden supermodels is more disconcerting than thought-provoking.
The one burning question Sucker Punch will leave in your mind is whether Snyder is still the right guy to be helming the next Superman movie after Bryan Singer’s abortive 2006 reboot.
A few will find this a fantasy worth escaping to, but like Skyline, Battle Los Angeles, Hobo with a Shotgun, and a disconcertingly high proportion of other recent fare, Sucker Punch is aimed squarely and unapologetically at the lowest common denominator.
When a movie nominally about female empowerment and set largely in a strip club is itself a soulless shell of a thing going either cynically or stupidly through the motions to fleece audiences of their money . . . we hope moviegoers still remember a thing or two about irony.