Dir. ZACK SNYDER
2011
From ‘visionary’ director Zack Snyder, the mind behind the disappointing Dawn of The Dead remake, the godawful 300, and the surprisingly gratifying The Watchmen, comes his latest visual feast, Sucker Punch. Emily Browning stars as Baby Doll, a young girl who finds herself confined within the borders of a mental institution at the request of her beastly stepfather and has five days until the mysterious ‘High Roller’ (played by Jon Hamm) comes to lobotomize her. As a coping mechanism for her frightening reality, she constructs several different layers of fantasy and through these imaginations, she plans her escape. In her first delusion she is transported to feudal Japan where The Wise Man (played by Scott Glenn) advises her that breaking out is indeed possible but she will need to obtain five items in order to do so: a map, fire, a knife, a key, and something unknown that will require a great sacrifice. Baby Doll shares her scheme to a group of fellow inmates, who with nothing to lose agree to take part in the attempted escape. Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, the girls fight giant samurai, a legion of zombie Nazi soldiers, and a fire-breathing dragon for their chance at freedom. As the Wise Man proclaims, ‘If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything’.
Sucker Punch certainly has a lot of things going against it; for one, dialogue written by Zack Snyder and a cast of actors who aren’t talented enough to overcome the film’s script deficiencies. But, amid the cheesy moments and its video game narrative, Sucker Punch takes us on a visually-dazzeling action-laden adventure that at least temporarily allows us to look past the film’s obvious shortcomings as we lose ourselves in its vivid imagination. Zack Snyder has learned from his dreaded errors on 300 and taken what worked in The Watchmen, and applied them here to craft a gorgeous looking piece of entertainment.
Just as those girls used their imaginations to escape their reality, we the audience sometimes go to the cinema to escape ours, and it’s films like Sucker Punch that offer this mindless escape. This is not necessarily a well made or enlightening film, and those expecting one are surely to be disappointed. It is, however, brainless eye candy that removes us from the everyday grind and transports us into an excessive world where everything is overdone; from the performances to the action sequences. While, we are only a mere spectator of these embellished video game scenarios, the stylish visuals and rocking soundtrack are more than enough to make Sucker Punch an ultimately satisfying movie-going experience.
[notification type=”star”]55/100 - Just as the girls used their imaginations to escape their reality, we the audience sometimes go to the cinema to escape ours, and it’s films like Sucker Punch that offer this mindless escape. [/notification]
