Imagine if Zack Snyder came into your house one day and took an anime DVD, a comic book and a Battletoads cartridge and put it in a blender. He would take this fine paste of extreme nerdery and spread it onto a scarf, which would be wrapped around his right fist.
He would then read aloud “A Scanner Darkly,” and just as you are about to ask him what the hell is going on, he cold-cocks you across the room.
This is the experience you get from Sucker Punch. It is, with so many grating imperfections, ridiculously exhilarating.
Emily Browning’s Baby Doll, a girl who initially looks so fragile she would shatter in half if a butterfly bumped into her, is sent to an insane asylum for accidentally killing her sister.
Shortly after she arrives the asylum shifts to a Moulin Rouge-esq brothel where the girls dance to entice clientele. Here Baby Doll learns that she can slip into a realm of action video game insanity by dancing and is instructed by the appropriately named Wise Man (Scott Glenn) to collect a number of objects that would allow her to escape.
The biggest strength here is that the script doesn’t do the tired dance of asking the audience to constantly question what is real or what is just Baby Doll’s psychosis, ala Shutter Island.
It’s all real for her, so it’s good enough for the audience.
It also helps that the transitions into the different realities are handled so well. Snyder manages to create a unique atmosphere and aesthetic for each of them. The fact that he can take us to them on a whim without any it of feeling jarring is commendable.
It’s when we get to the third stage, the one initiated by Baby Doll’s dancing, where Snyder’s forte is put to it’s limit.
The action is loud, full of detailed CGI and most importantly, smooth as butter. Lesser folks such as Michael Bay fill their action with nauseating amounts of camera shake and lens flare, but this is to hide the simple fact that they have no idea how to make things flow.
In Sucker Punch the fights are swimming in flow with no sense of self-restraint. There are Gatling gun touting samurai giants, steam punk WWII Nazi zombies, power armor straight out of “Starship Troopers” and even a Tolkien-esque dragon.
It’s like instead of an outline for the story, Snyder wrote a list of things from nerd entertainment he wanted in an action movie and worked up from there.
With all this visual insanity you would hope that the acting is just as sublime, but this is where the movie nearly kills itself.
To be fair Browning is competent and Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea has a few moments where she isn’t completely terrible.
Oscar Isaac’s turn as Blue Jones is pitch perfect even, with him giving the movie a villain to hate and sympathize with.
But everyone else, especially the group of girls that follow Baby Doll into the insanity world, might as well just be looking into the camera and repeating “I’m acting.”
Cornish has no subtlety with the bulk of her performance, giving over emphasis to what should be tender moments.
It’s also unfortunate that Jena Malone’s Rocket is a central character as she exemplifies how some of these girls should kill more robots and never talk.
The actors aren’t really helped by the dialogue though, with some lines drenched in cheese.
Thankfully Sucker Punch is just barely able to redeem itself with a genuinely surprising and entertaining overall story.
An argument could be made that there are some profound messages here, but I don’t think Zack Snyder ever really intended to have any kind of deeper meaning to the script.
He just wanted to make a movie with everything he loves and geeks out to, like Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez.
That’s what makes Sucker Punch worth taking the plunge; it’s a film made by a big nerd that looks amazing. It has some serious problems, but thankfully it has enough to overcome the major stumbles.
