The Film…
The Players…
Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens, with Jaime Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Issac and Scott Glenn.
The Plot…
Wrongly institutionalized after an accidental killing, a young girl known only as “Baby Doll” is slated for lobotomy. She’s not taking this lying down, naturally and aims to escape as well as take a bunch of her fellow young female inmates along for the ride. But a ride it is, especially when Baby and her buddies have to dance their way out and in of her mental phantasms.
Wait, what?
The Rant…
Horror master Stephen King once wrote in his Bare Bones memoir that one of his biggest and earliest fears was losing your mind. Going insane. Having the cheese fall off one’s cracker. He did admit that the fear was viewed through naive eyes. One does not lose their minds in one fail swoop, like on an episode of the Twilight Zone or something. King addressed the process of going mad brilliantly in his classic, The Shining. As it became with Jack Torrence, psychosis happens across a continuum, develops like a malign dream, is a sickness. Insanity is not like breaking a limb, sudden and immediate. It’s deliberate and slow. To quote Riff-Raff, “Madness takes it toll.”
Apparently no one told writer/director Zack Snyder this.
It seems after Snyder’s sudden and runaway success with his 300 he earned carte blanche to indulge his cinematic id. Shoot a movie that popped from his fevered imagination fully-formed like Zeus’ siblings from Cronos’ cloven skull. One with even more spectacle than the crimson Battle of Thermopylae could deliver. A phantasmagoria of dragons, ninjas, robots, fighter planes and of course, girls with guns. The hallucinations of a diseased mind hyped up on truck stop speed and espresso.
Behold the opus that is Sucker Punch.
The title alone says something. An unfair blow to the gut. That’s more or less what this film delivers. It meets the standard of poor reputation, sad box office draw, critical lambasting and naturally going way, way over budget. So begins the inaugural installment of RIORI. Hooray!
The Story…
A young woman known only as “Baby Doll” (Browning) and her sister lay victim to the cruel hands of fate. Orphaned and stranded with their demented, abusive stepfather (who does not take it well to find out he’s been disinherited), the two girls set about their new lives by just surviving it. One day when it comes to blows over Papa Dearest tormenting Baby Doll’s younger sibling, she takes matters into her own hands…
*cue sinister music*
…After a smattering of violence and the errant cruelty of chance, Baby Doll is swept away, banished to an insane asylum to wait out a full frontal lobotomy for her obviously unprovoked violent behavior. The place is a nightmare, inhabited by the usual rabble of crazies and depressives that would populate a Kesey novel. The desperation is inescapable, and not unlike the asylum itself, it’s a crippled world unto itself. So much so that no one can imagine ever being freed from this veritable hell. At least, not in any sane way. The only way out is through…
…So the new girl Baby Doll and her fellow “dancers” are stuck in this prison of a bordello, more or less forced to grind and/or twerk for their supper. There is the subtle yet urgent desire to break the bond that traps them here, but no real plan, no obvious solution. Until Baby Doll slowly learns that swaying her hips in the right direction may lead her to freedom…
*cue Bjork*
…Then after an encounter with a mysterious, shaman-like mystic (Glenn) in a Shinto temple amid frozen wastes, Baby Doll is instructed that the only way out of her prison requires a grouping of five totems to which she must fight to obtain. She must travel afar and across many dangerous worlds to collect these totems, the sum of their value yielding freedom. The classic quest personified with the lone warrior armed with only their wits, courage and a sacred katana…
The Review…
*tumbleweeds roll across webpage*
Plot make any sense yet? There’s a plot? Is one even necessary? If the above sequence of events seem disparate from a single film, you’d be wrong. It’s more or less how Sucker Punch plays out. All at once. That rigmarole is a single film, one and the same.
WTF? Uh-huh. Yeah.
Sucker Punch has got to be one of the most demented sci-fi/fantasy/action hybrids I have ever seen (as if I’ve seen many sci-fi/fantasy/action hybrids at all).
The story is inscrutable, the acting both entrancing and repellant, the sets off-the-wall amazing and depressing and the F/X so beyond over the top you cease to have a suspension of disbelief. You have to go with it because otherwise, if you think about what’s going on too much, your brain would pop and spurt out of your ears like so much hot cerebral tapioca.
In short, Sucker Punch is awesome.
Sometimes you just wanna be entertained. Sometimes you need a big old guilty pleasure to make the day ease by a little smoother. Sometimes you feel like having your senses and sanity assailed, whipped with a cat o’ nine tails made of cobras wielded by a nude, immolated dominatrix that can juggle chainsaws, do origami with her toes and has a PhD in metaphysics whose name is Sheila. This is the movie for you.
Say what you want about Snyder’s infamous cinematic flair for visually going over the edge, he’s damned good at what he does. Punch has got something for everyone, except much consistency, substance or sense. The movie’s nothing short of utter nonsense, relying almost totally on the applesauce that usually complements a film’s key components like plot, acting, three-act structure, catering, etc. Epic special effects and big stupid surround sound eruptions. Martial arts and trench warfare. Robots and rockets. And of course, girls with guns in skimpy/tight outfits. Not to mention also that this film was dropped at the beginning of spring, before God, when most filmmakers are just putting out dandruff made last year. What balls it takes to make a film that is completely devoid of all the niceties and pretensions of polite, professional cinema. It’s oddly refreshing and to a lesser degree…quite mature.
I know. Calling out Sucker Punch’s execution as mature seems like a lot of hogwash considering Snyder’s debut was the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead. Almost all of the Living Dead movies (save the original) are nothing more that puerile exercises in adolescent salivations for gore and mayhem. But to just toss everything out the window, simultaneously hurling sh*t at a wall just to see what’ll stick is a stance of defiance that only the most courageous, confident and maverick filmmakers command.
There is a ridiculous amount of heavy-handed symbolism, granted, as if even the most water-headed filmgoer can hitch a ride and take it all the way to the end of the line. Such handholding can come across as insulting at best and sturdily mawkish at worst. Such sophomoric storytelling is usually accompanied with a three season deal for a reality show on some Fox network, usually resulting in a book deal with Snooki (oops). Such rampant juvenilia usually hawks a big gob at any sane movie watcher. And yet, it does take guts (maybe not much brains) and a self-assuredness that only comes with a measure of wisdom. It also takes being stubbornly attached to your vision, no matter how myopic it may seem. In sum, Snyder is f*cking crazy. Bold, but f*cking crazy all the same.
Enough pontificating. What made the movie so “awesome?” Well, beyond the visual and sonic treats there’s…uh…nothing else really. The plot is wafer thin, moving along like sludge, only in place to be used as a medium to bounce from a scene of action, titillation, more action or another sequence that hopefully results in a lot of sh*t going kerblooey.
And the acting? Who cares? Only Jena Malone and Scott Glenn have any real acting chops. You might remember Malone portraying Jake Gyllenhaal’s girlfriend in Donnie Darko. She’ll be in the forthcoming Hunger Games sequel too, and possesses both earnestness and sass that works pretty well with her character Rocket here in Punch. Glenn’s been all over the place, known for playing grizzled characters, like Jack Crawford in The Silence Of The Lamba and Capt. Mancuso in The Hunt For Red October (guy seems to like working with Hollywood adaptations of novels). I enjoyed Glenn’s goofy cameos in the film quite a bit; an anchoring factor in a film that is always threatening to come off the tracks. Other than those two, the rest of the cast is only there to look pretty (they succeed. Duh).
The cinematography was mounted on a careening roller coaster. Very well, I might add. Nothing stays still for very long here in the world(s) of Punch. It’s a very, almost exhaustively kinetic film. Two hours freaking jet by watching this travesty. The frenzied action scenes are only interrupted by the “B” plot of the girls trying to flee the bordello/asylum/Babydoll’s ailing mind/who the f*ck knows awash in greys and silvers and a lot of dour expressions, an ethereal “reality” invading our crack-addled amusement park. This tries to be congruent and symbolic of the “A” plot, or is it the “C” plot? Christ, I couldn’t keep track. If this is Snyder’s attempt at auteur filmmaking…
Forget it. I should just stop trying. There are no redeemable “serious” filmmaking machinations at work in Sucker Punch. The only constant in the film is that there is a whole winking and nodding aspect of the feature that repeatedly shouts at you, the audience, are in on the whole messy jest. The unfortunate part is that the joke is without a punchline. Snyder gave us nothing to hang onto. Again, was that the point? The whole movie was pointless.
And rising above all this degradation was a solid two hours of entertainment.
At any rate, all this overly elaborate editorializing may fly in the face of what I’ve been rambling on about for the past few minutes. Maybe Punch wasn’t intended to be the masturbatory effort Snyder barfed out, rife with neon symbolism, feminine fantasies, an examination of mental illness and hallucinations of sphinx-like splendor. Maybe all Snyder wanted to do was deliver shock and awe. Visual and sonic bombast. A manga come to life. Scott Glenn in period garb. An excessive blow to the senses. Maybe stuff like that.
Sometimes that’s all you really need to be entertained, I suppose.
The Verdict…
Rent it or relent it? Rent it. It’s mindlessly stunning. Everything else that justifies cinema’s reason for being gets tossed out the window here, along with the kitchen sink. Not everything that gets filmed has intentions of winning an Oscar. “Sucker Punch” goes so far beyond popcorn movie status that it’s in a category all by itself. Mental illness never felt so good.
The Musings…
- “So this is what we call ‘theater’.”
- There is a nice perversion of pop songs throughout the film. Not terribly subtle ones, but nice accents all the same. If I were to codify what a geek I really could strive to be I’d make a write-up of the soundtrack’s playlist. If I were that kind of a geek. I’ll spare you the details, but I have to respect a film that utilizes the Stooges’ “Search And Destroy” so keenly.
- Is that really how lobotomies are administered? Please say no.
- Jena Malone sports some really cool hair here. I just had to mention.
- For the record, Bakers’ chocolate is wholly inedible as a standalone food, and definitely not worth risking sexual abuse for. Another traveling tip.
- Who wants to wager that Snyder is an unabashed otaku? Not I.
- “Oh yeah. And one more thing…”
The Next Time…
Who watches the Watchmen? I will.