Sucker Punch (2011)

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, Alex watches a movie he wants very much to like.

the movie has other ideas

Overview: A variety of young women are, for one reason or another, dumped into a mental hospital that apparently also doubles are some kind of cabaret/theater. They're treated poorly by everyone, and one young girl who we only know as "Babydoll" concocts a daring plan to escape.

Her dancing is apparently so entrancing that she's able to capture the undivided attention of nearly anyone watching, which the other girls use as a distraction as they carry out their plans, represented onscreen as exaggerated fantasy sequences such as the girls being an elite anti-Nazi squad in a steampunk World War II London.

Notable moments/quotes: Behind Babydoll, her evil step-father and the orderly negotiate a bribe to keep her there under trumped-up circumstances. She continues staring ahead blankly, taking no action to save herself.

Old man who reappears in the fantasy sequences: "Don't feel bad about killin' em. They're already dead."

Old guy: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Other girl: "You got family?"
Babydoll: "No."
Character whose name I never caught in the movie proper despite being a major character: "Oh, that's right, I forgot you're an orphan."

sure, the dialogue sucks, but ROBOTS! get distracted by the shiny, consumers!

Old man: "When you find the baby, you must slit its throat."

Babydoll, contradicting the entire movie: "This is not my story. It's yours. Now don't screw it up, okay?"

My thoughts: I had heard only bad things coming into this movie, but I had hope that it would prove to be some kind of misunderstood masterpiece. The premise is pretty solid, particularly as an excuse for a "realistic" movie to cram in ridiculous action set pieces the likes of which director Zack Synder excels at. Unfortunately, the introduction sets the bar way too high for the rest of the film.

We open on a spooky, Victorian-style house, where we're treated to a scene free of dialogue that shows the lady of the house dying. Babydoll and her sister are devastated, but their step-father is enraged once he opens the will and see that all her possessions are to be left to her daughters. He then goads Babydoll into fighting him and accidentally killing her sister, which the step-father uses to get her locked away. The overall vibe, despite cheesy music, is very dramatic and sets up an expectation that eventually we'll see the heroine overcome all obstacles and get her revenge on dear ol' not-dad. I had high hopes after this scene, because it's filled with stylistic flair.

The movie then never brings up this plotline again and has Babydoll sacrifice herself at the end of the flick, saying it's not her story despite being the viewpoint character for the entire running time up to that point.

Sucker Punch: fuck you, audience

The movie makes near-constant use of pop songs for its soundtrack. These songs, at least to my taste, felt unfitting and downright forced most of the time. Now, I'm no big fan of this director. I was lukewarm at best about 300 and I just shit all over the godawful Man of Steel in the movie podcast I co-host. I'll freely admit that Synder does action very, very well, and he has a strong style that makes his movies visually distinct. This shows in Sucker Punch, as the action scenes tend to be fantastic visually and just the right amount of over-the-top to fit the film's vision.

Unfortunately, these action scenes fall prey to a problem present in many of his movies: lackluster characters.

Even Babydoll, our protagonist, isn't given much character beyond "wants to escape" and "dances good." The bad guy is a sleazy money-grubber, the other girls are poor broken birds that just need to escape, etc etc. With all the characters so one-note, it was difficult for me to feel any connection with the stakes. I didn't care about the characters. I couldn't even muster up enough ambition to hate them. Synder and the script treat his girls in this movie as just another piece of the intricate scenery of battle. Rather ironic for a movie allegedly all about female empowerment and escapism to have its main characters almost as imprisoned by their roles in fantasy as they are in reality.

Speaking of reality, the action scenes also lack punch due to their lack of reality. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing a cute girl with a katana fight a giant samurai who's wielding a mini-gun, but there are almost no stakes to the action. These fantasy sequences are literally replacing the girls actually sneaking around and stealing supplies or whatever their current state of the plan is, and as a result, we have a weird version of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee, where not only do we know almost nothing about the plan but also we see next to nothing of the actual execution in reality. The movie drops this conceit towards the end as the plan unravels and several of the girls gets killed, and these segments to me were far more interesting than the overblown fantasy bits as the girls struggled to adapt on the fly.

somehow less engaging than...

...this. It's like having your heroes not be invincible adds drama or something.

The movie is rich with symbolism in the fantasy pieces, but we don't really get time to appreciate it as the action zips by. I almost felt that these bits were thrown in to preempt any claims that this was just another dumb action movie. Well, those fail, to be perfectly blunt. The symbols are either far too obvious (a dragon standing in for a very nice lighter) or obscure/odd (an activated bomb standing in for a kitchen knife) to really pack too much of a punch. It's not as though I want everything spelled out for me Barney-style, but when I'm pulled out of the impressive action for "huh?" moments, the movie undermines one of its few good points.

I'm a big fan of way over-the-top action when it serves a purpose, serves to propel the story forward, and has characters I can relate to (i.e. Kill la Kill, Edge of Tomorrow), but this movie doesn't really do that. Pondering it now, it almost feels like Synder looked at a script filled with desperate, realistic action and said, "Nah. Now bro, I got this idea for like, these hot chicks fighting Nazis, yeah? And there's also this steam-powered giant mecha they use to wipe 'em out. And the Nazis are also zombies." The end result is a movie that feels just as mentally disturbed as its main characters, but doesn't use this fully to its advantage due to an over-reliance on bombastic action and poorly explained bullshit like the old man from the fantasy segments being a bus driver who takes the one survivor away, even lying for her when he's never met her before.

I wanted to like this one. It's saddening that Synder disappoints me every time (with the exception of his Watchmen adaptation).

I give this movie a Nic Cage Fucks with His Comrades out of ten. Facebook and Patreon still stand.