When I decided to go see Sucker Punch, it struck me that I didn't really have any understanding of what the film was about. As the credits rolled, I realized nothing had changed.
The Action
Lets start with a relatively straightforward aspect of the film: the action scenes. And it has to be said that Sucker Punch's action scenes are pretty awesome. They are well-choreographed, creative, and extremely pretty.
There are also more up-skirts than you can poke a tube of KY at. Pre-pubescent "Palm Pilots" are going to want to get this one in full HD, trust me.
The problem is that the movie is always distracting you from a completely adequate game of spot-the-flange by insisting that each action fantasy scene actually represents another event in the real world. Or, even worse, an intellectual idea of some kind.
Either way, it's more than a little confusing. The random fight scenes are a visualization of our main character, Babydoll, in a whorehouse dancing for some male customers. OK. But wait, the whorehouse is a fantasy world too, right, one she created to avoid the realities of being raped and lobotomized.
So what exactly is being communicated here? That, within the first escapist fantasy, Babydoll needs to fantasize to a second level to escape the harshness of her own fantasy world? Well then why did she make the first fantasy so shit to begin with then?
Nice one Babydoll, why not just go ahead and fantasize grinning midget clowns riding on oversized tricycles?
So the action scene where she kills a bunch of giant robots is actually euphemized representation of her dancing for customers in a whore house, which in turn represents her getting violently raped and lobotomized in a mental institution in the real world.
Got it? We're watching a rape. With Samurai swords. And you found this enjoyable? You're a sick fuck.
See how it gets distracting? Perhaps Snyder would have been better served by just stringing all his cool action scenes together and dropping down the frame rate a few notches to bump the running time up to feature length? Wait, the action scenes were already shot in the slowest slow-mo possible without using a surge of 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to power the camera crank.
All the better to up-skirt you with, my dear.
The Feminism
I went into Sucker Punch vaguely expecting to see a John-Woo-esque "girl
power" femo action movie, but thinking that I would probably be able to forgive it because I'd get to see the girl's undies every time they high-kicked a dude in the face.
I generally try not to take the feminist aspect of these kinds of movies too seriously. Thelma and Louise, Jennifer's Body, Charlie's Angels, Chicks With Guns 4; I just try my best to ignore the patronizing neo-feminist mesages in these films because... well... it's not really FOR me, is it? Or is it? Fuck, I don't even know.
It's not that I don't fully support giving young girls self esteem and a healthy sense of empowerment, but it kinda irks me that these movies seem to be saying that it's ok for girls to hit dudes in the face or kick them in the balls, often with very little justification - like leaving the toilet seat up, or rape - and that the audience should cheer for such violent behavior.
To be honest, this issue has compounded for me in recent times. It can't be
completely unrelated to this girl-power trend in movies that I have been getting slapped across the face more and more in the real world. Screw you, Hollywood, for teaching helpless girls how to fend me off. Stalking used to be much easier. Sigh.
Anyway, interestingly, I'm not sure Sucker Punch is a particularly feminist
movie. Or at least not a typical one. There are a lot of girls kicking ass,
sure, but all such action takes place in an escapist fantasy, and, as far as I can tell in the reality of the movie the girls have no power at all, as they are locked up in asylum, getting raped and lobotomized by the staff.
So if you were to take a message away from this, it might be "sorry girls,
you simply can't avoid getting raped by men, coz they are the strong ones, but, hey, at least have a couple of fun fantasies about being ninja assassins while your genitals are getting pounded into a bloody meat-pile."
The Story
You have probably gathered by now that there is a little confusion going on
here. It's all very dream-within-a-dream, but not in a good and satisfying
Inception kind of way, more in a bad and nauseating Vanilla Sky kind of way. The problem is, the movie never clearly communicates what is reality and what is fantasy.
You could argue that the movie is just leaving room for interpretation, like the spinning top at the end of Inception. OK, fine, but Inception only leaves you with ONE question at the end. A big one, sure, but it's just one piece of ambiguity.
In Sucker Punch, everything is ambiguous. For example, in the opening scenes of the film, Babydoll's mother dies, leaving her and her sister with an abusive step father. She is shown escaping out a window, then in the next scene she returns with a gun. At this point, the step father is seen bending menacingly over the sister, and might even have had a knife in his hand, I can't remember.
So Babydoll fires the gun at him, apparently misses, and hits a steam pipe
behind him. Next thing you know, the sister is bleeding and dies in Babydoll's arms. Did Babydoll somehow shoot the sister through the steam pipe? Did it ricochet off, but at the same time punch a whole in the pipe? And where the hell did she get the gun anyway? Last we saw her she was jumping out a window trying to escape.
Then at the end, she's still in the mental hospital at the exact same moment we launched into her original fantasy, but it seems certain elements of her fantasy actually happened in that reality too. They mention someone escaped, and the fire she set as a distraction.
I read a lot of theories on the internet and the only consistent thing about them is that they make less sense than a rambling, drooling, straight-jacketted politician. If any of the theories I read were what Zack Snyder intended, then he simply didn't communicate it well with his film-making.
A few more hints would have been nice, Zack. Or is it just the case that you
had as little idea what was going on as your audience?
It is indeed hard to believe that, with the level of painstaking detail and
visual creativity that went into every single frame of this movie, that its
maker wouldn't have put just a little thought into what it all might mean.
But I bet, at the same time, if you traced Zack Snyder's credit card
transactions, you'd find a bunch of them would link him to a website that allows you to purchase genuine Japanese schoolgirl panties.
Conclusion
I didn't hate Sucker Punch at all. I liked that it wasn't really feminist,
but might be ambiguous enough to make stupid people think it was. It had good action, good music, and lovely visuals. It kept me engaged throughout and actually made me think a bit.
And a decent smattering of panty-flashes.
3 stars.
PS: if this review has convinced you to skip Sucker Punch and see a different movie, I'd feel a little bit bad. So here's a few nice upskirt photos so you don't feel like you missed anything.
And, yes, I enjoyed researching that bit.
The Action
Lets start with a relatively straightforward aspect of the film: the action scenes. And it has to be said that Sucker Punch's action scenes are pretty awesome. They are well-choreographed, creative, and extremely pretty.
There are also more up-skirts than you can poke a tube of KY at. Pre-pubescent "Palm Pilots" are going to want to get this one in full HD, trust me.
The problem is that the movie is always distracting you from a completely adequate game of spot-the-flange by insisting that each action fantasy scene actually represents another event in the real world. Or, even worse, an intellectual idea of some kind.
Either way, it's more than a little confusing. The random fight scenes are a visualization of our main character, Babydoll, in a whorehouse dancing for some male customers. OK. But wait, the whorehouse is a fantasy world too, right, one she created to avoid the realities of being raped and lobotomized.
So what exactly is being communicated here? That, within the first escapist fantasy, Babydoll needs to fantasize to a second level to escape the harshness of her own fantasy world? Well then why did she make the first fantasy so shit to begin with then?
Nice one Babydoll, why not just go ahead and fantasize grinning midget clowns riding on oversized tricycles?
So the action scene where she kills a bunch of giant robots is actually euphemized representation of her dancing for customers in a whore house, which in turn represents her getting violently raped and lobotomized in a mental institution in the real world.
Got it? We're watching a rape. With Samurai swords. And you found this enjoyable? You're a sick fuck.
See how it gets distracting? Perhaps Snyder would have been better served by just stringing all his cool action scenes together and dropping down the frame rate a few notches to bump the running time up to feature length? Wait, the action scenes were already shot in the slowest slow-mo possible without using a surge of 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to power the camera crank.
All the better to up-skirt you with, my dear.
The Feminism
I went into Sucker Punch vaguely expecting to see a John-Woo-esque "girl
power" femo action movie, but thinking that I would probably be able to forgive it because I'd get to see the girl's undies every time they high-kicked a dude in the face.
I generally try not to take the feminist aspect of these kinds of movies too seriously. Thelma and Louise, Jennifer's Body, Charlie's Angels, Chicks With Guns 4; I just try my best to ignore the patronizing neo-feminist mesages in these films because... well... it's not really FOR me, is it? Or is it? Fuck, I don't even know.
It's not that I don't fully support giving young girls self esteem and a healthy sense of empowerment, but it kinda irks me that these movies seem to be saying that it's ok for girls to hit dudes in the face or kick them in the balls, often with very little justification - like leaving the toilet seat up, or rape - and that the audience should cheer for such violent behavior.
To be honest, this issue has compounded for me in recent times. It can't be
completely unrelated to this girl-power trend in movies that I have been getting slapped across the face more and more in the real world. Screw you, Hollywood, for teaching helpless girls how to fend me off. Stalking used to be much easier. Sigh.
Anyway, interestingly, I'm not sure Sucker Punch is a particularly feminist
movie. Or at least not a typical one. There are a lot of girls kicking ass,
sure, but all such action takes place in an escapist fantasy, and, as far as I can tell in the reality of the movie the girls have no power at all, as they are locked up in asylum, getting raped and lobotomized by the staff.
So if you were to take a message away from this, it might be "sorry girls,
you simply can't avoid getting raped by men, coz they are the strong ones, but, hey, at least have a couple of fun fantasies about being ninja assassins while your genitals are getting pounded into a bloody meat-pile."
The Story
You have probably gathered by now that there is a little confusion going on
here. It's all very dream-within-a-dream, but not in a good and satisfying
Inception kind of way, more in a bad and nauseating Vanilla Sky kind of way. The problem is, the movie never clearly communicates what is reality and what is fantasy.
You could argue that the movie is just leaving room for interpretation, like the spinning top at the end of Inception. OK, fine, but Inception only leaves you with ONE question at the end. A big one, sure, but it's just one piece of ambiguity.
In Sucker Punch, everything is ambiguous. For example, in the opening scenes of the film, Babydoll's mother dies, leaving her and her sister with an abusive step father. She is shown escaping out a window, then in the next scene she returns with a gun. At this point, the step father is seen bending menacingly over the sister, and might even have had a knife in his hand, I can't remember.
So Babydoll fires the gun at him, apparently misses, and hits a steam pipe
behind him. Next thing you know, the sister is bleeding and dies in Babydoll's arms. Did Babydoll somehow shoot the sister through the steam pipe? Did it ricochet off, but at the same time punch a whole in the pipe? And where the hell did she get the gun anyway? Last we saw her she was jumping out a window trying to escape.
Then at the end, she's still in the mental hospital at the exact same moment we launched into her original fantasy, but it seems certain elements of her fantasy actually happened in that reality too. They mention someone escaped, and the fire she set as a distraction.
I read a lot of theories on the internet and the only consistent thing about them is that they make less sense than a rambling, drooling, straight-jacketted politician. If any of the theories I read were what Zack Snyder intended, then he simply didn't communicate it well with his film-making.
A few more hints would have been nice, Zack. Or is it just the case that you
had as little idea what was going on as your audience?
It is indeed hard to believe that, with the level of painstaking detail and
visual creativity that went into every single frame of this movie, that its
maker wouldn't have put just a little thought into what it all might mean.
But I bet, at the same time, if you traced Zack Snyder's credit card
transactions, you'd find a bunch of them would link him to a website that allows you to purchase genuine Japanese schoolgirl panties.
Conclusion
I didn't hate Sucker Punch at all. I liked that it wasn't really feminist,
but might be ambiguous enough to make stupid people think it was. It had good action, good music, and lovely visuals. It kept me engaged throughout and actually made me think a bit.
And a decent smattering of panty-flashes.
3 stars.
PS: if this review has convinced you to skip Sucker Punch and see a different movie, I'd feel a little bit bad. So here's a few nice upskirt photos so you don't feel like you missed anything.
And, yes, I enjoyed researching that bit.
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