Sucker Punch
**In order to properly frame my thoughts on “Sucker Punch,” there will be more than the usual spoilers in the following paragraphs. You’ve been warned.**
There’s a saying I’ve heard over my years of movie geekdom: A movie’s trailer sells the movie the studio wishes it had, not the movie it has. This is important to consider when looking at Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch.” In the trailer, we got hot, young women in scant outfits fighting and kicking their way through a fantastical universe. Oh yeah– this is DEFINITELY the movie Warner Bros. wants people to come see.
Once you get your butt into the theatre however, this is where Snyder (working for the first time from an original idea) pulls the old switcheroo, and gives us something far more interesting, if less successful. This is Snyder’s most ambitious film to date; the director of 2004’s superb “Dawn of the Dead” remake, “300,” “Watchmen,” and last year’s “Legend of the Guardians” has been working towards this film since he first came onto our radar. Now that he’s here, at the full blossoming of his visual and narrative gifts, I can only imagine what he’s coming up with for 2012’s “Superman: The Man of Steel.” I’m sure it’ll be something to behold.
How is this Snyder’s most ambitious film? I mean, the man directed the previously “unfilmmable” “Watchmen” in 2009; how is this more challenging? Well, it helped with “Watchmen” that he had brilliant source material from comics icon Alan Moore. But I would argue that Snyder could never have made “Sucker Punch” without the narrative and emotional challenges “Watchmen” presented. Here, Snyder and co-screenwriter Steve Shibuya are dealing with serious and difficult subject matter in a wholly original way from how we’ve seen it before.
Like his “Superman” producer Christopher Nolan did in “Inception,” Snyder tells his story on multiple levels of reality: the first one is the “real world” (which is only seen at the beginning and end), in which we see Baby Doll (Emily Browning) try and defend her and her sister from their abusive stepfather, leading to her being sent to a mental institution after one tragic confrontation; the next is Baby Doll’s catatonic “fever dream,” in which she imagines the institution as a burlesque theatre where those in charge are dominating and willing to abuse and pimp out the women under their “care” as objects to be used; the third is yet another dream level of Baby Doll’s, in which she imagines herself as the leader of a group of five woman trying to escape the theatre– through the guidance of a wise man (Scott Glenn), the women are led through fantastic action scenarios to find five items which they will be able to utilize in escaping the prison they find themselves in on the level above.
It’s important to understand one thing about the film’s narrative: everything we see in between the opening and end sequences is all in Baby Doll’s head, a reflection of the protector she tried to be in real life, as well as her psychological choice of seeing the institution and its authorities (especially Oscar Isaac as the leturous Blue Jones) as people who degrade not just her but her fellow patients sexually and as human beings, although a Dr. Gorski (Clara Gugino), may or may not be an ally to the girls in the institution. This is an important thing to realize about the film, as it puts all of the imagery the trailers used to sell the film into context: Snyder isn’t making a film about hot women kicking ass as a way of objectifying them, but as a commentary on how women are objectified by men. Yes, Baby Doll and the other main characters (including Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea, Jena Malone’s Rocket, Vanessa Hudgens’s Blondie, and Jamie Chung’s Amber) look hot in the skimpy clothes we see them in, but their appearance isn’t what makes the action scenes exciting– instead, it’s the emotional stakes laid out during the scenes in Baby Doll’s “fever dream” view of the institution…well, that and the visionary imagination Snyder employs, combining several different genres (war movie, Tolkien-esque fantasy, steam punk and Anime) with an incredible soundtrack to create a bold and thrilling package.
When all is said and done, though, the film comes down to the emotional turmoil of its characters, and the strength they must display in order to make it through. The film is about the discovery of these women’s emotional strength in a situation that robs them of their dignity. Yes, the film deals with difficult subject matter for a PG-13 film, but should no PG-13 film be allowed to deal with subjects like sexual abuse and exploitation of women? It’d arguably be more exploitive if Snyder had felt that the only way he could deal with it was if he had to include graphic nudity and violence with these characters at the center. (The PG-13 rating, by the way, is appropriate. It’s the underlying subject matter that pushes the boundaries of the rating, not the way Snyder presents it. Had the film been more graphic and realistic in the violence and sexual exploitation these women must endure, an R-rating would have been the right way to go. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good reference point to understand where I’m coming from: That film could have only been R if it wanted to stay true to Moore’s original masterwork.) The film does suffer from narrative lapses caused by the use of voiceover and a twist ending that doesn’t really make much sense with regard to the rest of the film we’ve seen (unless there’s yet ANOTHER dream level that Snyder hasn’t set up as successfully), but Snyder stays true to his themes and vision where another filmmaker would have just gotten off on showing us hot chicks kicking ass. The result is a truly original and exciting film that lures us in with visionary scenes of action and adventure, but has bigger things on its mind. Who could have seen THAT coming after the surface thrills of “Dawn of the Dead” and “300?”
