Film Review: Sucker Punch (2011)

I’m going to risk sounding cliché, but when a film’s main focus is great visuals, somewhere down the line the ball is dropped in exchange, and naturally, the victim that receives the most gouging is the film’s potential to tell a compelling story. And in some ways, it can be argued that director and first-time writer Zack Snyder attempts to tell such a story in which a girl is wrongfully placed in a mental institute for girls and plans to break out. The problem is, however, whatever Zack Snyder is trying to convey through the story’s premise can suddenly be thrown out the window when audiences watch this same girl suddenly go into flights of fantasy in which she is an ass-kicking, katana-wielding babe in a skimpy sailor outfit, duking it out against giant stone samurai toting mini-guns, re-animated ghoul Nazi soldiers, and robots straight from the iRobot movie reject, but less lame. Of course, these are dreams within dreams, much like Inception, except the girls imagine they are harlots forced to entertain in a burlesque house instead of a looney bin, while still having the other illusions of fighting in worlds straight from a video game. Trying to make sense as to how girls in 1940s-ish could imagine combating robots, let alone piloting steampunk mecha, could prove fruitless.

Giant evil samurai with mini-guns. Damn!

Does the film fail because of this? Not necessarily. But it leaves some missed opportunities to build these characters, at least care more of their plight. There are some intriguing characters present on the stage Snyder has created, but we never get past their limited dimensionality. Most wooden of them all, Baby Doll, the aptly named protagonist, is easier on the eyes than her performance on screen.

Aforementioned, if Sucker Punch does a few things right, one is the combat dream sequences, which illustrates a dance Baby Doll and company use to distract their captors and collect items needed for their grand escape. These scenes are full of high octane, kinetic energy. But the film isn’t afraid to slow things down a little, figuratively and literally, and is not without some of Snyder’s signature revving into and out of slow-mo that could make The Matrix blush.

The Bottom Line: Those expected more from Sucker Punch than a sequence of sexy girls kicking the tar out of mutant samurai, ghoul Nazi, and robots, with some story sprinkled of a breakout from a mental institute, will be sorely disappointed. Otherwise, Sucker Punch is a visceral visual kick in the teeth.