Sucker Punch: Girls go to Jupiter to get More Stupider

Last Friday night, I was scrolling through the Amazon Instant Video Rentals, and I came across Sucker Punch.

I said to myself (because it was 1 AM and everyone else in the house was asleep) “I forgot about this film. I was gonna see it, but things came up and I didn’t. Hmm. The trailers look stupid, but my inner 15-year-old pervert is tugging on my arm to let us watch it and Watchmen wasn’t awful, so sure, why not?"

Dear lord. What have you done, Zack Snyder?

It’s stupid on so many levels, but let’s just start with the opening scene. It’s a rainy night, because that’s when everything bad happens, and Babydoll's mother has just passed. The step father looks at her and her sister and smiles, because the bad man is bad. He also smiles during the funeral. I get it. He’s bad. The following night, which is also during a storm, he reads the will and finds out in the that the girls get everything. He knocks everything off the desk, because that's how people express rage in movies. He also drinks some booze and throws it into the fire to get across the idea that he's angry because his acting isn't telling me that, and he attempts to kill Babydoll with his bare hands, because he's both drunk and stupid. When she gives him problems, he goes for her little sister. Baby doll escapes through the window, gets his gun, and fires the gun at him, missing him for her. She runs to her mom’s tombstone, and the police and her step father arrive. There’s no trial, or maybe we don’t see it. It’s like a morality play, but more one dimensional.

At the end of the film, Jon Hamm’s character lobotomizes Babydoll, and Dr. Vera Gorski walks in, explaining that she didn’t think that Babydoll needed it. The craziest part isn’t the fact that the woman who’s supposed to be in charge just walked in on a lobotomy she didn’t approve of, but that after the deed is done, she reminiscences fondly about Babydoll, remembering how she stabbed an orderly, started a fire, and let a mentally unstable and potentially dangerous girl escape into the world. 

The film is just stupid on every level, which is incredibly sad, as it tries to have more depth. By giving us more stupid levels.

In the beginning and end of the film, we see the “story” play out in a gray asylum. To cope with the dark reality, Babydoll sees the place as a brothel, because that’s more comforting, I guess. But when she dances, it becomes some sort of geek fantasy world where chews gum and kicks butt, and she's all out of gum. It’s like Inception for idiots, except, where Inception made an effort to explain what things in the dream represented in the real world (ex. rain in the dream = the dreamer needed to pee), Sucker Punch just screams “Who gives a shit? We've got a blond Emily Browning in a schoolgirl outfit!” 

Zack Snyder, the “director”, decides to make the obvious stuff clear and the difficult parts indecipherable. Babydoll and her gang need to acquire some real world items, and in the geek fantasy sequences the items have painfully clear parallels:

1.   Map = Enemy Map

2.   Lighter = stones that create fire, which are in a dragon’s throat

3.   Knife = a bomb, which is cleverly codenamed: “KNIFE”

But everything else in those sequences is ignored. We never find out what the other stuff represent. Later on in the story, in the brothel world, Blue, who’s a corrupt orderly in the real world, kills 2 of the girls with a gun, and assaults the dance instructor, who’s a doctor and his boss in the real world. What do those events represent? Because he clearly did not shoot 2 girls, point blank in front of his boss. It’s like Snyder is admitting that the stuff in the action fantasy world and in the brothel world have nothing to do with the plot or characters. It’s all one just one giant sex fantasy for him.

But you know what really ruined this film for me?

Emily Browning, the young lady who played Babydoll.

I had never seen her before in another film, so I really had no idea what to expect. It’s like Eliza Dushku’s character from Dollhouse…but worse. The film has Babydoll be the film’s Super-Batman-Jesus, but there’s no logical reason for her being so. In the dance studio, she’s told to dance, and the instructor starts playing music.

Babydoll just stands there, attempting to look confused (because she doesn’t know how to act confused). The instructor keeps pushing her, until, eventually, she supposedly dances so spectacularly that no one can stop watching her. I type “Supposedly” because we never actually see her mind-blowing dance. Whenever she starts to dance, we’re transported to one of her fantasy worlds. We have to take the film’s word that she’s amazing, but why should we trust the film? It’s a compulsive liar whose mother drank frequently during the pregnancy. There’s no reason why I should, or can, believe it.

And at one point, neither does the film.

Blue, in the brothel world, starts to suspect that an escape plan might be in development, and intimidates the girls, hoping to nip it in the bud. After he leaves, the girls panic, unsure what to do. Sweet Pea asks their fearless leader, Babydoll what to do, and who responds “I don’t know”.

But I don’t even believe that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, because even with all the detailed CG in the film, Browning’s performance is just...empty. It’s like if the only acting class Emily Browning took was January Jones’s class on “How to play Betty Draper Poorly.” All the other performances in the film are shallow and terrible, but Browning just doesn’t express anything at all.

·      She’s dancing = blank stare

·      She’s fighting a 20ft samurai with a machine gun = blank stare

·      She’s fighting an army of Terminator knock-offs = blank stare

It's as if she was lobotomized at the start of the film. And even her personality is blank. Gordon Freeman is more interesting of a character. Babydoll imagines herself in a brothel, feudal Japan, in a WWII-type place, in a Tolkien Fantasy world with dragons, and on a Sci-Fi train filled with fake Terminators. Maybe she’s imagining these places because she's a nerdy nymphomaniac, but that’s just an assumption. She never even mentions or references her sister’s murder. If you took that whole opening sequence out and just started the film at her entering the asylum, it wouldn’t affect the movie’s plot

One.

Fucking.

Bit.

I get that some films are about the CG, and not about the characters/writing (even though you can have a film with all those elements at around the same cost), but the story and the acting are so ineffably empty and loud that I couldn’t enjoy any part of the film. Not even my inner perverted 15-year-old self liked the film. He’s even considering not letting me see Man of Steel.

Unless Amy Adams shows us some bewbage.