Sucker Punch

The opening scenes of Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch are just as brutal and efficient as the opening credit montage of Snyder's Watchmen. Can we invent a job for Snyder directing the first five minutes of other people's movies? After the death of her mother, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) must intervene to stop her leering stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) from interfering with her younger sister (Frederique de Raucourt). After things go bad Baby Doll is sent to a mental hospital that's somewhere between a Dickens novel and early Tim Burton, where she'll be lobotomized by a visiting doctor (Jon Hamm) in five days unless she's able to escape. It's upon arrival at the hospital that the movie splinters into at least two levels of subjective reality, and where Snyder's graphic-novel sensibility (Sucker Punch is based on an original script but it doesn't feel like it.) takes hold. Yes the women of Sucker Punchdon't need a male to save them, but Snyder sexualizes them just as if they were in comic panels.  Baby Doll, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), and their fellow inmates are performers in a burlesque review inside someone's imagination; the revue is overseen by Blue (Oscar Isaac), whom we also see as the hospital's corrupt head orderly. Baby Doll's raw, spontaneous dance routine (which we never see) is so distracting to men that her friends are able to gather the materials for an escape plan while she performs.

Perhaps the strangest character in Sucker Punch is Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), a therapist who attempts to treat the girls through elaborate reenactments but who has no idea about the lobotomies and other cruelties going on around her. Gorski's advice to Baby Doll is to escape the indignities of dancing through imagination ("You control this world," Gorski tells her.) , and we're off into another layer of fantasy. While Baby Doll is dancing we see her and her friends engaged in a series of what can only be called fanboy fetish scenes. Baby Doll and Sweet Pea fight their way past giant samurai, Nazi zombies, and Lord of the Rings discards to procure what they need for escape. They're instructed by a character called Wise Man (Scott Glenn), and joined by Sweet Pea's sister Rocket (Jena Malone, who steals the movie) as well as Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). If you've seen ads for Sucker Punch then you know these action scenes are the movie's biggest selling point, and Snyder is undeniably gifted at keeping us oriented inside a CGI world. Yet why do these scenes exist? The movie offers only the most banal messages about freedom and self-empowerment, and these could have been conveyed through other means - like two people talking to each other.

Zack Snyder is in the eye candy business and Sucker Punch is high gloss stuff. Emily Browning gets the worst of it; I remember her being funky and winning in the Lemony Snicket movie, but here she's an apple cheeked fantasy object without an idea in her head. Snyder gives a sword and a schoolgirl outfit but hasn't bothered to give her any writing. Browning is outdone by Jena Malone as Rocket, a girl flush with excitement over finding a role model other than her sister and dizzy with the possibilities of what escape might offer. Sucker Punch is grayer when Malone isn't onscreen. Finally I don't think Sucker Punch is about very much other than it's own look-at-me energy, and while the movie is fun to look at in a blunt, obvious way it could have done better by both its PG-13 audience and its own characters.