Sucker Punch Was Made For Girls

Sucker Punch is pretty bad. But it's bad in a MAGNIFICENT way, and it actually has a lot of good things going on.

We have seen over and over again from Snyder that he can do big, exciting, and beautiful. Up to now, he's dealt with some pretty awesome source material; as his first project from an original source, I expected Sucker Punch to live up to his visual style and maybe offer something intriguing in the way of story - but to be totally honest, I never really cared about the story Sucker Punch was trying to tell. The trailers, through their ambiguity, encouraged you not to ask too many questions. Which made it pretty shocking when I realized that there was actually a story of some depth going on, it just wasn't happening to our "main" character and it wasn't the forefront of the action (more on this later). The rest of the ride is a sensory overload. Sucker Punch shines on two wavelengths: the over-the-top, visually and aurally rich action sequences, and the subtle undercurrent of Sweet Pea's (Abbie Cornish) story.

I want to talk about Sweet Pea here, but since almost everything I want to say is a spoiler I've decided the best course for this is to do a second entry with a big fat SPOILER ALERT tag that people can read if they've seen the film or if they don't care. This review, then, is spoiler free.

There are three levels of reality being dealt with here, and the one in which the film spends the most time on (the secondary level, dressed up like a burlesque house/prostitution ring) is the least interesting. I thought we could have benefited from spending more time in reality, the quasi-60's insane asylum for troubled teenage girls, but the important bit is that Snyder doesn't skimp on his third level, Babydoll's high-octane war zone. This is where the good stuff is: shrieking planes, zombie robot Germans, orcs, catapults, a fire-breathing dragon. Amber (Jamie Chung) pilots a gun bunny mech. There's a train with a bomb on it. It's good times. And these sequences are permeated with Snyder's typical bullet-time slow-downs, but it works here. You can really see the action (I HATE the speed-shaky action cam that makes it impossible to tell who's hitting whom), and you can see where the girls pull their own stunts (all five of our heroines went through extensive physical training for this flick, and it shows).

The other signature trait Snyder brings to these scenes is his color palette. The whole movie is shot in a gray tone, but the action sequences are highlighted with pops of color: gunfire, regular fire, the pink on Amber's mech, the gold in Rocket's (Jena Malone) hair. It plays into the overall fantasy effect, but it also makes the scenes beautiful in an interesting way (like the ever-falling snow). The snow, in fact, gives it a decidedly shojo feel, which I like. It gives the very masculine backdrops a feminine feel, reminding the audience that we are watching a girl's (and a young girl, at that) fantasy play out, rather than a boy's video game dream.

The soundtrack is brilliant, and would have saved the movie for me even if I hadn't had as much fun watching it as I did. Emily Browning covers two of the tracks and her voice is thin, a little reedy, very sweet, and completely haunting as it plays over the rain-soaked gray dreariness of the hospital. Especially in the opening sequence, where we see the circumstances through which Babydoll finds herself at the hospital, and there's no dialogue except Browning's rendition of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." It's beautiful. Also, whether by accident or design, almost all of the music is sung by women. I don't care what the reviewers are saying, this movie was made for girls.

That's the good, now for the bad: in a cast of about 10 characters, there are three really good performances. Emily Browning is a blank doll of a character, never showing more emotion than a small smile or glazed-over look. Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung are never required to do more than smile secretively and fire really big guns, but the film suffers for never asking more of them (although neither actress convinces me that they could have given more - Hudgens is all doe eyes and crocodile tears, and Chung is most emotive when she sucks on her lollipop). Carla Gugino, who I know is better than this, hides behind her absurd Germussion accent. John Hamm might have been effective, but he was onscreen for maybe two minutes - there was supposedly a scene between Hamm and Browning that got cut to keep the PG-13 rating, and I'm interested to see it just to see Hamm actually work a little.

Cornish and Malone together are rapturous. As sisters (supposedly, in the whorehouse reality), they are best when acting off each other. For getting surprisingly little space to actually act, they become the girls we care about and get invested in. The real winner, though, is Oscar Isaac as Blue, the orderly-cum-pimp: he is sleazy, smarmy, and, like a car wreck, impossible to turn away from on the screen. He's a fabulous villain, and he really owns the "Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?" abusive attitude in a shameless way.

Undoubtedly, Sucker Punch would have benefited from Snyder going all in and embracing the R-rating it so desperately wants; there are places he obviously pulled his punches to keep the PG-13, and the quality of the film suffers for it. However, I find it hard to disagree totally with his decision: this movie was made for adolescent girls. I know, the fetishist clothing and extraneous guns might disagree with me, but this is a movie about girls trying to take back their own lives and their own bodies. And I can't really blame Snyder for wanting the movie to reach the largest audience possible in the teen girl demographic.