Sucker Punch

It seems that I’m going to be that one voice that has to fight to stand out here. Many critics and movie goers have been pretty hard on director Zack Snyder. He’s made a total of five movies now, and it’s been enough for people to form the opinion that they really don’t like him that much. To be fair, doing a remake of one of the most beloved horror movies of all time, “Dawn Of The Dead”, was probably not the best way to debut. However, and this is someone that names the original as one of his all time favorite horror movies, the remake was pretty good. Ah, even as I type I can hear the rage of “Zombie’s can’t run!” and “The original was waaaaaaay better!”. And yes, that’s true, if I have to pick between the original or the remake, I’ll pick Romero. However, I still say that it is worth a look as an example of how to do a GOOD remake as it doesn’t feel like it needed to do anything other than have a similar idea, a bunch of people trapped in a mall while the zombie apocalypse is going on. He followed it with the enjoyable, if kind of stupid “300” and then the, I think, very well done adaptation of “Watchmen”. At the time of writing this I haven’t seen his animated effort “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’ Hoole”, but I may endeavor to do so in the future. The point I’m trying to make is that I enjoy Synder’s work. He always makes an entertaining movie and I have to give the man a thumbs up for making movies that seem like they have actual effort behind them in this age of Michael Bays and Uwe Bolls.
This brings us to the topic of discussion today, his latest and first original work, “Sucker Punch”. The premise is that of a group of girls in a mental hospital that’s being run by a group of corrupt men and one of them is facing a lobotomy in five days. In order to deal with it, she creates an alternate reality in which she and all the other girls are trapped employees of a burlesque house/brothel in the 1920’s.
I have a hard time being objective in my review of this movie because for me, it does so many things very well as far as I’m concerned, but I’m also going to have to admit, that it really isn’t that original. It borrows elements from several movies, fairly blatantly. Most notably Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” with the escape to fantasy to cope with reality, even the ending takes after Gilliam’s film a little. And most of the atmosphere and tone feels reminiscent of Dario Argento’s “Suspiria”, namely the implied child like nature of the girls, as well as some of the darker fairy tale type elements. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it does make me realize that a lot of people are going to be pretty unhappy with it.
Honestly, while I was aware and I’d most certainly prefer watching either of those again to “Sucker Punch” if I had to choose, I still enjoyed the movie. For as unoriginal as it was, for all the nit picks I could make, I have to confess, I was entertained. It’s the first action movie to come out in awhile that I actually had fun watching. The girls all perform well enough to get the job done, the script doesn’t really drag except for a little bit at the beginning, and I thought the action sequences were interesting.
That brings me to my next point. A lot of people do not like a lot of Zack Snyder’s style, most notably his use of slow motion. I’m the first to admit, yes, he can go over board and certainly does at certain points in “Sucker Punch”, but I would STILL take that over the shaky cam, choppy editing crap fests that Michael Bay likes to release on a regular basis. Mostly because, well, I can tell what the hell is going on. I’m honestly starting to think that action directors are really just resorting to the shaky cam tactic because they don’t want to use their brains and come up with a good action scene, which is a level of laziness that I cannot forgive. Added to the fact that I could actually see what was going on, I thought the effects are all pretty good and the fact that it was a bunch of attractive girls kicking all kinds of ass was certainly a fun thing to see.
Still for all the good the movie has, it does have some flaws, some of the villains go a little too over the top, like border line Saturday morning cartoon levels. At first I found it kind of funny, then it really started to get on my nerves. In fact, while the action scenes are the real attraction here, most of the scenes that take place in the brothel seem pretty half assed, in that way that they always are in action movies, purely existing to try and prove that they do want to try and connect the action scenes together in some fashion, and it goes about as coherently as you’d think. But I think most criminal of all, is the opening scene. I was fully prepared to completely hate this movie just from the opening. It’s pretentious, it’s slow (both literally and figuratively), and oh good god does it feel completely useless. The real narrative doesn’t start until it’s over, and all the background it gives on the main character would have been much better off just told as exposition or given as back story slowly through the film. However, once the movie actually gets going, I calmed down.
So overall, most of what I liked about “Sucker Punch” was just the fun of it. It was a action movie that tried to stand out a little, even if doing so showed that it was pretty much ripping off other movies. I would have called foul but then I got to see a bunch of girls in burlesque outfits pilot mech suits and use samurai swords to fight steam powered zombie Nazis… In my humble opinion this is at least fun enough to be enjoyable in that “Commando” part of the brain.

I give it 3 bad ass action chicks out of 5.

Worth a look in theaters, but not a definite must see.