I caught a late screening of Sucker Punch last week with my cousin Ky. We decided to see it in IMAX because Ky hadn't yet experienced the grandeur of the format. So we set off in the still darkness of a late Sunday evening to take in a movie. Neither of us knew precisely what the film was about. I purposefully stayed away from any potential internet spoilers, and let's face it, the trailers don't really reveal a fucking thing. They mostly just spotlight a series of random images of attractive young women with swords and guns, interspersed with explosions and the occassional dragon. Cool, slick imagery to be sure. But this tells us nothing.
We Were Un-Fucking-Prepared! - Story Time
What's the story? In short: Sucker Punch tells the story of a young woman who loses her mother to an unknown illness. Her eeeeviiiilll stepfather goes apeshit when he realizes that his wife has surprisingly left all of her assets to her two daughters, instead of his saintly, sweating self. So he comes to the only rational conclusion: rape and/or murder his stepchildren. The younger sister quickly succumbs to the stepfather's persuasive mitts, but the older sister proves to be more difficult prey, and he has her committed. Stepdaddy pays off King John the Orderly to have the girl lobotomized so she won't spill the murderous beans, Don Draper shows up to drive a big spike through her eye, and that's it. Spoiler Alert, I guess.
I know what you're thinking, Dear Imaginary Reader: what about the robots and the dragons and the steam-powered mechs and the clockwork hun soldiers and the ogres and the dirigibles and the bombers and the outer space and the flism flasm bobble bibble gerble derka derka?! Well you can forget about all of that, pal! Sure, that's all in the movie, but it adds up to nothing. These big, loud action moments that monopolize the theatrical trailers and television advertisements are all fantasy sequences that take place while our lead character Baby Doll is dancing for sweaty men in an imaginary brothel that exists only in her head while she is really confined in a sanitarium awaiting her lobotomy.
Also, they're flashbacks. Flashbacks of a fantasy-within-a-fantasy. So... yeah.
In the world of Sucker Punch, our heroine escapes the dreary reality of her life in a dingy loony bin by conjuring up a lurid fantasy world where she and all of the other patients are prostitutes/prisoners in a brothel run by King John the Orderly, who has wisely grown a stylish John Waters moustache. And within the imaginary brothel, Baby Doll finds out then when she dances, every man who watches her becomes strangely entranced.
Also, when she dances she is transported to another fantasy world where Father Moody from The Virgin Suicides tells her that she needs to find five things in order to "achieve freedom" before doing his best Steve Jobs impression with the "...and one more thing" schtick. These things are: fire, a map, a knife, a key, and the Mystery Ingredient That Will Be Revealed When The Plot Demands It! Then she fights a giant samurai statue with a gatling gun and a bazooka. For no reason.
Baby Doll puts her newfound hypnotizing dance skills to good use, distracting the menfolk in charge while her new hooker pals sneak around and steal the all-important goodies. While this is happening in the fantasy brothel, all four of Baby Doll's pals join her in her second-level delusion, where the awesome hypno-dance is represented by senseless violence, and our heroines must overcome armies of zombie soldiers and extras from Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy and terrible CGI robots with faces that reminded me of the Alchemist's mask in Pitof's Vidocq. Was that last reference too obscure? Eh, I understood it.
Eventually shit goes wrong. One of the girls blows up on a space train/gets stabbed by a morbidly obese chef, and two other girls get blasted in the head by King John the Orderly the Pimp. But Baby Doll finally realizes what the fifth mystery plot thing was: sacrifice. So she starts a fire in her room and distracts the guards long enough for her last remaining friend, the tall, mannish woman, to escape the brothel/sanitarium. Then Don Draper lobotomizes her and feels guilty about it.
Wait, did I forget to mention Carla Gugino? Damn. In Sucker Punch, she plays Dr. Gorski, a resident therapist who tries to reach her patients with her ridiculous Polish accent. In the fantasy brothel, she plays Madam Gorski, who teaches her hookers how to stay alive by not pissing off assholes with guns (oops!). After Baby Doll is lobotomized, she has a quick chat with Don Draper, halfheartedly mentioning how she disapproves of Draper's trade. But he wonders aloud why she would sign off on Baby Doll's dumbening if she disagrees with the treatment. He shows Gorski her forged signature on the release form, and she gets royally pissed when she realizes that King John the Orderly broke the rules.
It's kind of a funny moment, really. She clearly couldn't give a damn about what happened to Baby Doll in the scene, before or after she finds out that her signature was formed. But she loses her shit when she realizes that she's been duped. Gorski calls the cops and has King John the Orderly arrested for his misdeed while Baby Doll dumbly stares at a wall, the mannish woman hops on Father Moody's bus and rides off into the beautiful new day, and the eeeeeeviiiiillll stepfather sits all alone in his big house and counts his money, cackling like a madman. Happy Ending!!!!!
Guilt-Tripping Balls! - Why Does This Movie Hate Me?!
I'm not sure what Sucker Punch is trying to be. On a superficial level, one might see the film as a tale of female empowerment. But in the end, that's not really the case. Every woman in the story is beaten down and defeated by the sinister men in their midst. Only one girl manages to actually escape the nightmare, and even then her future is uncertain. Everyone else is either dead or lobotomized. The "fantasy world" in which Baby Doll resides is no escape from her miserable existence in the real world. It's actually worse because instead of simply being patients in an insane asylum, the girls are all prostitutes imprisoned by their male overlords and forced to attend to the desires of other sleazy dudes. Even in the big action sequences where the girls are kick-ass warriors, they're still dressed in tight, revealing outfits, looking like they just stepped out of a Victoria's Secret catalogue. They look beautiful, to be sure.
But it seems like director Zack Snyder wants us to feel guilty for finding them attractive. He's objectifying them in the film, and he wants us to be ashamed for leering at them in our comfortable seats. It reminds me of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which was a horror film that essentially condemned its own audience for watching two sociopaths destroy a happy middle-class family. People who watch slasher films tend to root for the killer, and Haneke was disgusted by that social behavior. Why would people willingly watch that kind of film? Why would they be entertained by that kind of film? So he made a film to punish that audience.
That's an oversimplification, but it remains an interesting cinematic oddity.
Now Zack Snyder is not nearly as talented a filmmaker as Michael Haneke, but he seems to be making a similar statement with his aesthetic choices in Sucker Punch. The stars of his movie are beautiful young women wearing provocative attire, and the film's make-up and lighting choices only accentuate their beauty. But they are abused, tortured, and murdered by the very men who objectify them. Only in a delusion can they ever overcome their abusers, and even that fantasy eventually falls apart. One escapes, but her sister loses her life in the process. Even the wise man who advises the girls in the fantasy realm speaks nothing but empty platitudes. He's the only positive male figure in the story, and he's just a hollow shell.
This movie seems designed to make every man who watches it feel like garbage. Where Funny Games was designed to shame horror film fans, I feel like Sucker Punch was made to shame a much larger audience: the heterosexual male. It's in the title of the film: the story looks to be going one way, then it pulls the rug out from under you and makes you feel like an asshole, only without any grace or skill. Perhaps I'm way off-base. Perhaps I'm giving Zack Snyder too much credit. Eh.
My point is this: Sucker Punch is shit. Very slick, well-produced shit. This is the first film Zack Snyder has directed that originated in his own head, and it shows. His previous efforts were all based on pre-existing material, so he had a framework to build on. With Sucker Punch, the story begins and ends with Snyder, so he has nothing to work with aside from his own ADD-addled grey matter. There are some strong elements to the film's story, but they're all so muddled by the bad acting, terrible dialogue, and unnecessarily confusing narrative that they all become lost in the shuffle.
I can see what he's trying to say with Baby Doll's dance/action sequences. We never actually see Baby Doll dance in the film. Her dances play out onscreen as massive, chaotic action scenes where Baby Doll and her friends are fighting against seemingly insurmountable foes, and succeeding. There's nothing sexy or seductive about her dancing, not to the audience. We're supposed to interpret her dancing as a battle. She's fighting for her life when she sways her hips for the menfolk. But this can be completely overlooked by the audience.
Not to mention the fact that Baby Doll is always the central character in her fantasy battles, yet her friends are actually doing the really dangerous work in the sanitarium/brothel. They're the ones who are actually stealing the necessary plot items, yet she's the big hero in these scenes. Because it's her story, I suppose. Until she admits to her mannish friend Sweet Pea late in the game that it's not really her story after all. It's actually Sweet Pea's story. So to give her friend the happy ending she deserves, she selflessly throws herself in harm's way to give Sweet Pea the time to escape. Isn't that just darling?
And the lines between fantasy and reality are so blurry in the film that it's simply confusing. In the brothel delusion, Baby Doll dances to distract the guards so that her friends can steal the items they need to escape. So what the hell is going on in the real world? Is she giving the orderlies blowjobs to keep them out of the way while her friends steal lighters and keys? Near the conclusion of the film, we see that Baby Doll set her room in the sanitarium ablaze, so that really happened. So did her friend Rocket really get stabbed to death by the swollen chef? If so, why wasn't he arrested at the end, along with King John the Orderly? We see him at the end, stroking the empty knife sheath on his belt, looking forelorn, but the cops didn't come near him.
Also, in the fantasy world, King John murdered two of Baby Doll's partners in crime. So did he kill them in the real world, too? If so, that just raises more questions. He wasn't being arrested for two counts of murder when the cops cart him away. No, he was being arrested for forgery. So what the fuck really happened? And when Scott Glenn, the "wise man" from Baby Doll's delusions, shows up as a bus driver in the real world in the final scene, that just raises further questions. Was Zack Snyder deliberately trying to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, or was he just fucking around? It doesn't really matter, because it doesn't really work.
We're also assaulted by absolutely terrible covers of songs from The Beatles, Eurythmics, Iggy Pop, Jefferson Airplane, Queen, and Pixies. These cover songs, mostly used during the overextended fantasy battle sequences, are uniformly horrid. The only song used in the film that doesn't sound like a techno nightmare is a new remix of Björk's "Army Of Me", and that's only because the song was damned good to begin with.
What about the characters? Maybe the audience could actually care about the film's characters if they ever actually felt like real people. None of the actresses ever manage to imbue their characters with any life. They all remain broad sketches of women in distress. This isn't entirely the fault of the film's actresses, however. Perhaps if their "visionary" director had given them a well-written script to work with, they may have actually been able to bring something to the table.
Zack Snyder seems to be a director in the George Lucas mold, in that he's more interested in the special effects than the actors. That's fine if he hires good actors and gives them a decent script to draw from when he's fretting over the digital world he's trying to create. He failed to do that in this case.
The film ended with some of the worst "motivational speech" narration I have ever heard in a film, and it sent the audience laughing out of the auditorium. Outside, I heard people conversing in small groups, wondering what the hell they had just seen. I can say definitively that nobody who saw our screening of Sucker Punch enjoyed the experience. The responses ranged from confused to downright hostile. One man stormed out of the auditorium loudly deriding the movie as "utter horseshit". I find it difficult to disagree with that man.
Oh... And One More Thing...
When you think about it, Sucker Punch is Zack Snyder's Inception. Not because of the "multiple fantasy layers" thing. No, Zack Snyder, like Christopher Nolan cashed in his success chips at Warner Bros. to make his dream project a reality. Unlike Christopher Nolan, Zack Snyder didn't have the creative talent to make his dream project anything more than a curiosity; an interesting failure.
Perhaps Snyder was trying to make a bold statement with his film. In his head, maybe Sucker Punch is as powerful an exploration of mental illness as Milos Foreman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and the film's blurring of reality and bittersweet conclusion are as meaningful as Terry Gilliam's Brazil. In the real world, however, he just created a loud, exhausting mess of a movie.
On the plus side, the movie looked very good in IMAX. That's all the praise I can muster.
Better luck next time.
P. S. - More stuff is in the works. That is all.
Fucking awful movie.
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