Sucker Punch

I was so excited to see Sucker Punch, I was hanging out for it ever since I saw the trailer. I had loved Watchmen. And 300 was well done for what it was. So girls-kicking-butt-to-escape-asylum seemed like it would be too much fun.

It was so over the top and ridiculous that it just seemed to be doing things because it could: Sense and Reason be damned! And sometimes that type of thing can be great, so maybe it just caught me on an off day when a little more substance wouldn’t have gone astray.

There were three main things that irked me with this movie:

1) More than half the movie was in slow motion. Or that’s what it felt like anyway. And it’s not even slow motion that lets you savour the exciting near-misses, or gravity-defying jumps. Yes, I can see she is walking into the asylum. Yes, I can see she is glancing at that person. I don’t really need it spelt out to me like I have never seen a movie before or have no notion of narrative. This technique was used in a really classy way in Watchmen, and the other films Zack Snyder directed. But it’s almost as if he had run out of ideas and because it worked before, he’d just use it again and again. The first half-an-hour (and then some) felt like a glorified music video.

2) I lost all sense of reality. I know this was the point of the movie, but it went like this: Story begins in real world. Then girl gets taken to mental hospital by evil step-dad. Then after getting a glimpse at the real state of things, we’re thrust into a fantasy version of the asylum where it is set up like a club with performing girls. We can only assume that the guy who runs the place (in the real version) pimps out the patients. Ok, I get that and I get that a club scenario is a much sexier way to describe that situation. Then within that make-believe world, the girls dance, and when they dance they enter an epic-fantasy-war-zone of various descriptions. In this imaginary world they manage to achieve the steps they need to in order to escape. And they emerge from the ‘dance’ with the outcome reflecting what happened in that over-the-top battle. And again, I accept that within the premise of the movie. What annoyed me was, we didn’t ever come back to the ‘real world’ until right near the end when everything was going wrong, and throughout it all I couldn’t work out a reasonable real-life comparison to the imaginary events that we were being shown. Sure, I could see how they fit into the “club” scenario, but not an actual mental hospital. Not to mention that the main character is still wearing her “dance costume” when we are well and truly back in the real world which left me thinking, wait, what the hell is going on here?

3) I’ll keep this one short just to avoid spoilers and because I’m starting to feel like I’ve spent long enough talking about this movie. The ending was weak, predictable, and entirely underwhelming.

So, if you’re interested in seeing a movie that apparently is more about girls in sexy outfits kicking butt in an extremely un-realistic way than it is about anything understandable or relatable, then Sucker Punch is for you.

Who knows, when I’m in the mood I might find myself watching it again, desperately trying to make sense of it. At least then I’ll know what I’m getting myself in for.