Sucker Punch – Sexist fantasy mess? Plus, watch the first five minutes here

Here’s a question that would be great to put to a round-table of professional filmmakers. Can a great action sequence ever work without context? Think about it, would the foyer shoot-out in The Matrix have worked if we didn’t know a) what Neo and Trinity were capable of, and b) what was at stake? What if the “spinning corridor” sequence in Inception had taken place in the first ten minutes of the film. Would it have the same impact? Would it have any? This question might seem like the minutiae of critical thinking, but here it is vital because it largely decides whether Sucker Punch is any good or not.

We start strongly, with an excellent music only prologue telling the story of our protagonist, a petite blonde known only as Baby Doll (Emily Browning), and her tragic journey that concludes with her locked up in a mental institution. From here, the lines between reality and fantasy blur as Baby Doll and her fellow inmates of what appears to be the Asylum For Improbably Attractive Women, attempt to break free of both the institute and their tyrannical orderly, Blue (Oscar Isaac), with the film spending much of its time in a fantasy world of Baby Doll’s creation.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much as you get plot-wise. There’s little to no character development, and the girls, far from being post-feminist ass kicking warriors, spend most of their time being subservient and meek in the presence of either Blue or Baby Doll’s “spirit guide” (Scott Mann). The fantastical “Bordello” setting in which the female ensemble spend the majority of the story also misses the mark as an analogy for sexuality as a weapon and comes off more as a misogynistic directorial decision to keep the hormonal young men in the audience interested throughout the film’s contrived stages.

“Contrived?” you say. Absolutely, and this links nicely back to our original discussion: Action without context. Within the opening 20 minutes Baby Doll finds herself deep within her own fantasies, in the grounds of a Japanese temple, fighting three monstrous Shogun warriors. It looks great, its well choreographed and works well with 300 and Watchmen director Zach Snyder’s trademark ultra-stylised technique. But here’s the problem: Why is it happening? We simply don’t know. Baby Doll’s spirit guide instructs her to defend herself, but from what? In what is presented as the real world she is under no threat whatsoever at that moment in time, so the consequences of failing to defeat her foes are confused and largely irrelevant. Given that this format is rinsed out and repeated another four times over the course of the film, there is so much “Why?” to contend with that the audience is left struggling to care what happens next.

An ongoing theme of the film is examining the bleeding of fantasy and reality and vice-versa. There is a way of doing this well, providing the audience with a base from which to explore the disparate elements of the fantasy/alternate world (Donnie Darko is a prime example of this). Sucker Punch, however, takes this idea too far. There is too much crossover between the worlds and the audience loses its base. For lack of a better phrase, this film drowns itself in the waters of ambiguity.

Perhaps this is too harsh. Perhaps searching for deeper meaning in a film in which girls in short skirts hack up robots with Samurai swords is like searching for political commentary in The Fast And The Furious. To an extent, that’s true, but then, if you’ve got all the ingredients of a dumb action film, why not make a dumb action film? Nobody would think any less of you. Snyder needs only look at his own previous for evidence of this. 300 was as big and stupid as anything Hollywood has produced in recent history, and yet it didn’t shy away from its identity and was critically and financially well received as a result. Here Snyder tries to be too clever by half and by adding a labyrinthine “what’s real, what isn’?” element, has made a rod for his own back, and in doing so, alienates almost every demographic in the theatre.

It’s not all bad. Isaac as the antagonist is excellent, his Blue cutting a menacing overlord figure within the fantasy and a weasely coward in the real world. The film also places critical importance in its soundtrack and it lives up to these expectations, delivering a combination of pulse-pounding instrumentals and decadently twisted versions of old favourites, including The Beatles and The Pixies.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to cover up Sucker Punch’s manifold shortcomings. The whole thing feels forced, as if Snyder had three or four good ideas for action sequences and shoe-horned them into the first bankable idea (hot women escape from prison) that came into his head. Meaty, loud set-pieces mean nothing if they can’t be tied to something with substance and the pseudo-intellectual examination of the fantasy/reality divide is not a strong enough glue to hold the film together.

Overall Verdict: Too dumb to be smart, too smart to be dumb. Sucker Punch attempts to simultaneously thrill us and make us think and achieves neither. A couple of cracking action sequences and an aesthetically pleasing ensemble cant cover up the fact that this is a complete mess.

Reviewer: Alex Hall