The Tao of Suck

Posted by: Basement Cheetoh Eater Posted on Posted in: , , ,

There is much to like in Zack Snyder’s new “vissureal” experience called “Sucker Punch”.  The problem is, there isn’t much to love.

As directors go, Zack’s always an interesting challenge.  I tend to be a vehement defender of his; and sure, people can take shots at the faux homoerotic bravado and CGI-infused ‘300’…but I enjoyed it for what it was:  one man’s retelling of a larger-than-life tale meant to inspire his countrymen to action.  And on those terms alone, I find it a fun ballet of orgiastic violence and sepia-washed cinematography (if you can call it that).  I even liked The Watchmen….but perhaps because the performances stood taller than the film itself (with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley turning in solid memorable roles).  But my favorite work of Zack’s would be ‘Dawn Of The Dead’.  Rather than remaking Romero’s satirical classic, he turned it into his own exploration of survival and group politic.

But does ‘Sucker Punch’ hold the same allure as those other films?  The short answer is: yes and no.  It has its own voice…but that voice tends to strain in the second half as the film loses momentum and stumbles across the finish line.  It gets the job done…but the journey is an awkward one filled with impressive leaps and even bigger missteps.

SuckerPunch2Sucker Punch is a tale about a 20 year-old girl named (called) Baby Doll who, in a grim and exaggerated 1955, finds herself institutionalized after accidentally shooting her own sister while trying to protect her.  For reasons that don’t require much thought, Baby Doll finds out she’s scheduled to be lobotomized in 5 days.  Rather than accepting her fate and giving up, she inspires a handful of other surprisingly well-kempt beauties to escape.  But the escape is no easy feat…nor is it easy on the viewer.  You see, Baby Doll just can’t accept the Tim Burtonesque surroundings…so she envisions the mental ward as a swanky bordello where her and the other inmates serve as in-house “entertainment”.  As Baby Doll is commanded to entertain her clientele (metaphorically stated as “dancing”), she dreams of wild landscapes and terrifying battles (as each dance serves as an opportunity to collect an object needed to assist in the escape).  So, we’re not talking two realities here.  There’s really three…and arguably a fourth.

But Inception this is not.

These girls can’t just imagine weapons that will assist them with their escape from the hospital (and by proxy, the bordello as envisioned in Baby Doll’s second reality); they’re bound by the laws of the hospital reality (reality as most would consider it)…and those laws can prove fatal.

What’s surprising is that the battle scenes don’t wind up being the most interesting part of the film. Rather, the bordello scenes boast the film’s strongest thematic moments (and the best examples of acting throughout).  Special mention must be given to Jena Malone (Rocket) who almost single-handedly makes you give up caring about all the other girls…she owns much of this film and will likely be the actress who benefits from it the most (Abbie Cornish’s career was already on the upswing before the movie was released though she’s probably the second strongest performance).

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I declare him AN OUTLAW!!!!

The trailer is, of course, famous for two things:  the CGI-heavy but epic-in-scale battle scenes and the positively ridiculous level of beauty of the captive girls (let’s be honest:  if they truly looked like that, we’d all have become orderlies long ago).  But, surprisingly, the film doesn’t actually sexualize the girls nearly as much as one would think having seen the trailer.  In fact, their sexualization is shown as brutality….the hopelessness of violation remains a recurrent theme throughout the film (and is also responsible for one of my biggest complains about it:  it’s gorgeous to look at but not much fun to watch).  This isn’t a “fetishistic” exercise as some have claimed – nor is it a strong example of female empowerment as Zack likely hoped.  It falls somewhere in between – showing us that women can be easily brutalized by society; but they’ll fight back to the death if the need is great enough.  I’m not sure the final message is a totally positive one…but at least it’s not seedy.

The fight scenes themselves span the gamut in terms of fun and insanity: the earlier fights (all of which are too brief), are beautifully staged and gorgeously realized.  Special recognition must be given to the ‘steampunk’ imaging of World War 1 which is the absolute highlight of the film and really should have been the focus of its own story.  But, as the film moves on…and the girls finish off the samurai giants and Prussian warring zombies (and start facing dragons and robots), the fights themselves become a tedious and dull viewing experience.  The robot fight, in particular, felt like a wasted opportunity – and was also the sequence that was most disconnected from the more surface realities in terms of narrative (as if Zack lost sight of the necessary connections to the hospital and Baby Doll’s fate; and instead just wanted to think up more “awesome” villains for the girls to plow through).

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That's one bad bunny.

And this brings to mind my second complaint about Sucker Punch:  the first half is, by far, vastly superior to the second. The opening scenes and initial battles make promise of greater events to come as does the foreshadowing by a particularly scummy orderly (who whispers about the coming of a “high-roller” that Baby Doll must entertain). But, when the high-roller arrives, the film does nothing with him – supposedly 90% of their moments (including a graphic love scene) were cut from the final edit, leaving the viewer unsatisfied and wondering what the point was.  It’s the equivalent of playing through a whole video game to get to the end battle, only to find out that the “main boss” just sits there watching you as you run around the screen.  He simply serves no purpose in the film other than to function as a stand in for an important figure in the real world – trite but almost totally uninvolving.

And that’s my final criticism:  this isn’t an emotionally involving film.  Zack seems to have wanted to make a drama with fantasy / action overtones but neither fully succeeded.  It’s a film more of half measures than thoughtful dichotomy – it’s overly serious (killing the ‘fun’ of the film) but too disconnected from reality to be emotionally engaging.  Zack seems to have struggled deciding which film he was going to make:  the kick-ass powergirl fantasy or the mournful depiction of women’s suffrage?  His indecision fails both possibilities.

I don’t mean to sound overly negative.  To be fair, this is a film anyone can like on some level..there’s certainly enough going on that it offers “something for everybody”; but I doubt many will fall in love with it.  It holds the viewer at arm’s length and yet asks you to embrace it….but you simply can’t.

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Is it ok if these sisters kiss?
Comments (29)

  3. I concur. Was Sucker Punch fun? Yeah, sort of. Good movie? Mmmmm…naw. Lotta action, but not enough of anything to care about. It’s like, “LOOK! A SAMURAI with a gatlin gun!” OK, but where did it come from? What’s his story? What’s his input here? Answers: Don’t know, doesn’t matter, and none. And that’s a fucking problem.

  4. Going in you know it isn’t gonna be all THAT good…movies that trade on the exploitation angle can’t really be credible saddled with a PG-13 rating, thats the kiss of death for a film of this type. PG-13 is fine for Batman…but over the top sex laced imagery and violence demand an R.

  5. I haven’t seen this…..but it is odd. Watchmen would’ve been fine with a PG-13, and this looked like it demanded an R. I wonder if they would’ve both done better were the ratings flipped.

    Also….no Dominique Swain? FAIL. Long have I dreamt of her going ass to ass with Princes Malone.

  7. here’s how I voted….

    Best Picture — INCEPTION

    Best Actor — Colin Farrell — ONDINE

    Best Actress — Amy Adams — THE FIGHTER

    Best Director — Nolan — INCEPTION

    Best Poster (official or unofficial)

    http://www.impawards.com/2010/…

    Best Trailer (official or unofficial)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

    Best Fight Scene

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

    Best Comic Book Movie

    no comment

    Best Horror Movie

    no comment

    Best Sci-Fi / Fantasy — TRON: LEGACY

    Best Thriller — EDGE OF DARKNESS

    Worst performance — Natalie Portman — BLACK SWAN

    Most WTF moment — 108 minutes of BLACK SWAN

    Hero of 2010 — CHRISTIAN BALE, not as a character, as a man.

  8. It actually doesn’t work as an exploitation piece Cons….it doesn’t interlace their sexuality with the violence – instead, they portray the girls as “empowered objects” almost like human totems. It’s weird…the more I think about it, the more it feels bi-polar.

  12. MOTHERFUCKER.

    Everything on the site is set fine.

    All I found was this FAQ bullshit….

    ————————————————————————

    Have you consulted the FAQson the gravatar site?

    These are the best practices for uploading your gravatar:

    (1) Prepare the image prior to uploading it and make sure it’s no larger than 128 pixels X 128 pixels square.

    (2) The image filetype has to be either PNG, GIF or JPG. Make sure the file name contains only letters and numbers – no special characters – and make sure all letters are in lowercase.

    (3) Also make sure the image file name has an extension (Example – image.jpg)

    (4) Note that there is a time delay while your gravatar image propagates.

    (5) If you are experiencing problems then go to the gravatar site http://en.gravatar.com/ and read the FAQs as it contains common questions and answers to them http://en.gravatar.com/site/faq/

    • I thought it was pretty intense. Aside from a few problems, which I’ve related over at Moonwolves (hold the fucking camera STILL, Liebsman, during the early character building scenes, you fucking moron!), it was exactly what I expected: Some intense firefight/in-the-shit battles against aliens.

      And did anyone else think Aaron Eckhart would make a badass older Cap in a better Captain America movie? That was older Cap right there: sacrificing himself to save others, to save the mission, having younger soldiers follow him into certain death bc of his values and what he’d done for them in the past.

      Yeah, I wanna see him take up the shield.

    • It could have used more character work, but I had no problem with the dialogue (the way some on AICN talked about it, I expected many groan-inducing scenes that would have be screaming “NO ONE would talk like that in this situation!!”, but it never happened.

      So dialogue wasn’t an issue for me. Story wasn’t an issue for me. Having more characters to care about- biggest issue for me. But not a dealbreaker for my first viewing. We’ll see on the second.

    • Ah fuck. Leave it to you to set me right. Thanks Xi. I am extremely ignorant when it comes to this. So help me out: Soldiers are only the army? Sailors the Navy, Marines the Marines… what do you call people in the Air Force? Pilots of officers? I bet there’s a joke somewhere in there, right?

      So why isn’t a Marine considered a soldier? I, and I’m sure others do to, connect the word “soldiers” with every person who fights for us in the armed service. Why is that incorrect?

    • Truth is, I just forgot they were Marines. Is there some differentiation between them and soldiers when they’re on the battlefield? I wish all marines carried a sabre into battle. It’d be badass seeing them stab an alien through the head with one.

    • Vader,

      A soldier is member of the United States Army, it’s a catch all for anybody in the ARMY no matter what your MOS is. Soldiers have earned the title “Soldier” just like I did when I was in the Army.

      Marines are members of the United States Marine Corps which is a navel service and have earned the title of Marine. It’s true some of the jobs do over lap, like Infantry, artillery and armor but the titles do not over lap. Each title is earned respectively to their service and are not interchangeable at all in any way shape or form. Now with that being said I do fuck with everybody I work with by proudly putting up Army things like my Ranger tab and Ranger battalion scroll(etc) that I earned in my broom closet sized office. Douche bag Officers get apoplectic when they find the nuts to come into my office and see that of course it’s very rare that am Officer has the intestina fortitude and the ability to find my office or that I’m actually in there.

      The collective term for Air Force enlisted is Airmen.

      Yeah Danny I thought about that long discussion you and I had back in the dawn of time as I wrote the first post to Vader.

    • I’m weird about seeing movies that get gang pounded on by critics for dumb reasons, That’s not you Chetoh you’re review is even handed, almost invariably I go and see a movie and judge for myself. The only critics I even take the time to listen to are people I talk to on the internet, like here or at Moonwolves, since all “real” critics opinion don’t mean shit to me those worthless cocksuckers.

    • Yes sir i did and I mentioned it before a couple of years ago around Veteran’s Day when a discussion broke out on a TB at Fatburgh about actors that served in the Armed Forces. You yelled at me about the subject matter…on Veteran’s Day.

      Just for the hell of it here’s some people that served in the Marine corps that you wouldn’t think would, some saw combat some didn’t.

      Musician Freddy Fender although it didn’t work out well for him at the end he was court marshaled

      Bob Keeshan aka Captain Kangaroo

      Don Adams of Get Smart he was a DI and the only member of his platoon to survive Guadalcanal.

      Scumbag extraordinaire F.Lee Baily but he doesn’t’ count since was an aviator, an Officer and a lawyer.

      Massive cocksucker Pat Robertson who is a scumbag( one of many reasons) who lied about serving in combat in Korea. His powerful democratic Senator daddy kept him in Japan supplying booze for the Officer’s Club. It figures that piece of shit was an Officer.

      Donald Bellisario TV king pin.

      Sterling Hayden veteran of OSS operations in WW2 primarily in Croatia won a silver star.

      Scot Glenn actor

      Gene Hackman

      That rapper you were talking about that died a few ago? Nate Dogg I think?

      Bob Bell aka Bozo the Clown

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