Sucker Punch

Is it just me, or are the big budget spectacles coming out of Hollywood becoming dumber by the minute? Just a couple weeks ago, we had Battle: Los Angeles - A simpleminded take on the standard alien invasion plot that filled itself with a lot of noise, nonsensical dialogue, and characters who barely reached a single dimension. It was a mindless assault on the senses, but thanks to an aggressive marketing push, people ran out and saw it.

Now we have Sucker Punch, and it too is a mindless assault on the senses, with common sense being the greatest victim. It is a simpleminded take on...Well, Hell if I know. Director and co-writer Zack Snyder (who has recently been given the helm of the next Superman movie, hopefully not on the basis of this film) fills his movie with gorgeous young actresses who are given no characters to play, then has them standing in front of a bunch of images that look like they were stolen flat-out from various comic books, video games, and Japanese anime. The movie is supposed to be about young girls finding strength within themselves by using fantasy to escape from cruel reality, but that would require a movie with an actual vision, style, sense, and purpose. This film has none. We're bombarded for almost two hours with random CG images, mediocre acting, and terrible screeching music, then stumble out of the theater dazed, confused, a little sad, and angry over what passes for entertainment these days.

The story kicks off with the melodramatic tale of Baby Doll (played by former child actress, Emily Browning). Her mom's recently died due to the dreaded "plot convenience disease", leaving her and her little sister in the care of their greedy stepfather, who wants to kill them, so he can collect on their inheritance. To make a long story short, little sister winds up dead, and Baby Doll is shipped away to one of those dark, gloomy insane asylum mansions you only see in comic books or film noir, after stepdad convinces the authorities that she's psychotic. This entire sequence is done without dialogue, only music, which would be effective in another film. But, because of Snyder's directing style and his choice of music, this feels like a really expensive music video. It's the first of many scenes just like it, where a classic song is covered by a modern band, often quite badly. He makes a mistake by drowning out the dialogue, forcing us to focus on the music instead. If there's any soundtrack that deserves to be in the distant background, it's this one.

At the asylum, Baby Doll is put under the care of Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino), who sort of talks like Frau Blucher from Young Frankenstein, and teaches the girls in her care to act out their problems and frustrations through role playing exercises and imagination. This inspires Baby Doll to dream her way out of the asylum, and into a prison of a different sort - She's now a dirty dancer/prostitute at a sleazy nightclub run by a gangster named Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac). Blue is also one of the more crooked orderlies at the asylum, so Snyder is obviously going for a kind of Wizard of Oz deal, where the characters play similar roles in the real world, and the fantasy world. For example, in the fantasy world, Baby Doll's fellow dancers are the other patients. They include sisters Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Rocket (Jena Malone), the brown-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and the Asian girl Amber (Jamie Chung). That's really all you need to know about them, as well as all the movie tells us about them.

So, in fantasy, just like in real life, Baby Doll and the other girls want to escape from their prison. Fortunately, Baby just happens to be one heck of a dancer - so good she can mesmerize the staff at the shady nightclub, while the other girls try to steal the stuff they need to escape. Whenever Baby Doll starts to dance, she's whisked away to yet another fantasy world that seems like it was designed by a 13-year-old boy who's been given a blank check by a major studio to create a fantasy world. It's filled with giant samurai warriors wielding chain guns, robots, dragons, monsters, undead Nazis, giant battle mechs, World War II fighter planes, castles, futuristic utopias, and who knows what else. A movie with imagination could have thought of countless things to do with these creations, but the film we're given is bankrupt. The effects are just that - visuals. They add nothing to the experience, they're just up on the screen to look expensive. One might argue that they fill their purpose, but it's a lousy purpose.

I was astonished by soulless nature of Sucker Punch. Here is a movie so cynical, it makes the fantastic downright feeble. Nothing carries any weight up on the screen. There's nothing to care about, nothing to think about, and certainly nothing worth remembering. The movie bombards our senses, turns up the volume, then bombards us some more. I looked at all the money being burned up on the screen, and the hours of work it must have taken to put it all together. Why couldn't they have put one character with personality into the mix? Why did Zack Snyder decide to shoot so many of his scenes in ugly browns, blacks, and pale blues? (To the movie's credit, it's not in 3D, which would have made it even murkier.) Why does the movie never once come close to telling a compelling or even a coherent narrative? Instead, it repeats a simple and monotonous formula - There's some forgettable dialogue, Baby Doll dances for somebody, we get 20 minutes worth of special effects with no purpose, repeat.

The cast is really made up of some attractive bodies filling the screen, interacting with the effects around them. The women vamp it up, the men camp it up, and nobody comes close to creating a genuine character. There's even one character whom the movie makes no effort to explain. That would be the Wise Man (Scott Glenn), who appears in all of Baby Doll's fantasies as a mentor and motivational speaker. He appears in different forms (usually a military general, but sometimes as a martial arts mystic), but never comes across as anything more than a gimmick. I wish I could point out one memorable character, or quote one line of dialogue that stood out. But that would require a screenplay that had more thought put behind it other than it being an expensive technical demo.

Much like Battle: Los Angeles, Sucker Punch has been graced with an aggressive marketing push, so that every teenager will know to see it this weekend. Then it will be forgotten once the next (hopefully better) spectacle comes along. Are audiences just willing to accept anything that looks expensive? I really hope not. This is a bloated and joyless movie, and ranks as one of 2011's very worst films.

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