You see, the men in "Sucker Punch" are all bastards; they rape, they sneer, they gawk, they unlawfully lobotomise and they display no mercy. They are all shown to be corrupt, murderous and ape-like, as gormless cavemen whose brains seem to dwell in their ever-erect penises. The only one who seems the slightest bit decent lives within the imagination of the main character. As Hugh Grant eloquently put it in Chris and Paul Weitz's "About a Boy," "After about ten minutes I wanted to cut my own penis off with a kitchen knife." I felt similarly. And this wasn't just because of the apparent misandry.
The girls, on the other hand, are intended to be awesome and cool and strong and mighty, given licenses to kick ass and spill CGI blood. This is supposedly all in the name of feminism and girl power; Snyder seems to think that giving a woman a machine gun and dressing her up in skimpy outfits gives her social strength and independence. It doesn't. All it does is make her more of a subject of the male gaze.
These girls are all inmates of an asylum for the mentally insane, each given stripper-style nicknames (this soon becomes appropriate). We have Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish, "Limitless"), Rocket (Jena Malone, "The Messenger"), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, "High School Musical") and Amber (Jamie Chung, "Sorority Row"), all good friends who stick together, all good friends abused by the men in the facility.
However, there's a newcomer to the institution in the form of Babydoll (Emily Browning, "The Uninvited"), a 20-year-old with platinum blonde pigtails and a fragile demeanour. She's been sent there by her abusive brute of a step-father (Gerard Plunkett, "Snakes on a Plane") after her attempt on his life ended in the death of her little sister. To make matters worse, the hulking bastard bribes the orderly (Oscar Isaac, "Robin Hood") to make sure Babydoll gets a lobotomy so that she can't reveal what really happened that fateful night. I repeat: men are bastards.
And then, all of sudden, during a tour of the asylum, the setting turns into a brothel, and Babydoll is an orphan who has been sent there to work. In this imaginary world, Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber are now all exotic dancers, and Babydoll is to join them and be trained by Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino, "Watchmen").
Turns out Babydoll is quite the dancer, impressing and arousing the lip-licking men who watch and spontaneously drool on the dance floor. Strange thing is, whenever Babydoll swishes and sways she transports to another imaginary land in which she's an ass-kicking samurai pistol-blaster in a schoolgirl outfit. There, she meets the Wise Man (Scott Glenn, "Secretariat"), who tells her she can escape from the asylum/brothel by finding five coupons: a map, fire, a knife, a key and a mysteriously unnamed item.
From here on, the film consists of a monotonous structure; music plays, Babydoll begins to dance in the brothel, gently swinging her hips from side to side before being transported to magical lands in which she is briefed by the Wise Man and fights otherworldly villains (dragons, cyborgs, zombie Nazis, etc.) along with her four new friends to find a precious item, and then it's back to the brothel, where Babydoll has finished her dance, and the music comes to a halt. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To say "Sucker Punch" is excruciating would be an understatement; the film is so annoyingly repetitive that it renders itself obnoxious and eventually rather boring. Yes, a film with fire-breathing dragons, bomb-guarding cyborgs and undead Nazis is a tediously boring experience, feeling so overblown and desperate to be a teenage boy's wet dream that it becomes just silly and irritating.
Almost everything about the film comes across as an excuse for Snyder to use the talents of cinematographer Larry Fong, the director's partner on "300" and "Watchmen." "Sucker Punch" is undeniably a visual extravaganza (not only in the action scenes), Fong strutting his wondrous stuff, but it is never more than this -- one has to feel that this should have just been a collection of music videos, which it essentially (and annoyingly) is.
It is troubling how the plot and concept (which came from the mind of co-writer Zack "Slow-Motion" Snyder) are squandered so horrendously. Fantasy worlds, mental asylums and rough-tough gals are handled so badly that the film ends up a 110-minute mess that is sure to numb cinemagoing arses everywhere. I know mine wouldn't feel a thing if you were to stick a pin in either of the two cheeks.
The posters for "Sucker Punch" tell us we will "be unprepared" -- I certainly wasn't prepared for how abominable the next two hours would be. Laboriously repetitive and stupidly trying to be thematically clever, Zack Snyder's newest slow-mo epic fantasy actioner is an overcompensating load of old tosh. A teenager's wet dream is made into a moviegoer's worst nightmare.
2/10
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