0 out of 10
Oh well, that’s $50 and two hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Zack Snyder’s fantasy epic Sucker Punch is perhaps the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The film is weightless, soulless and lacks any semblance of story or narrative cohesion. In reality, Snyder has made the world’s first long form music video.
The film stars a bevy of young, beautiful, talented actresses including Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung and Jena Malone, each of whom give the worst performance of their young careers. The film also co-stars the normally fantastic Carla Cugino, whose performance here is nothing short of dreadful. Sadly, Cugino gives an Oscar worthy performance when compared to actor Oscar Isaacs, who is sure to be a lock for a Razzie nomination. Isaacs’s performance is so awful that the audience I saw the film with were actually laughing every time the actor spoke one of his cringe inducing lines. There are really no words to describe just how horrific Isaacs is in this film.
The story (if you can even call it that) is about a teenage girl named Baby Doll (Browning) that is committed to an insane asylum by her evil, rapist stepfather shortly after her mother dies. In all fairness, the five minute sequence that begins the film, setting up the story and showing the stepfather for the child molesting scumbag that he is, is both creepy and effective. Snyder always amazes me with his talent to set up a story with largely dialogue free scenes set to music, like he did with Watchmen. Unfortunately the whole movie is like this.
Once Baby Doll is at the asylum, we learn that her stepfather has paid the head orderly (Isaacs) to have her lobotomized in five days. What’s a girl to do? The asylum that seems to be filled with only teenage girls comes off like the orphanage from Annie on LSD; a hard knock life indeed. Watching Baby Doll scrub floors, I expected her to start belting out “Tomorrow”, but that never happens. It probably would’ve made the movie better; it couldn’t possibly make it worse.
The girls of the asylum learn to express their feelings through interpretive dance (I’m not kidding) and when Baby Doll dances for the first time, all who watch are entranced. It is at this moment, that the ridiculous nature of the film truly begins to take shape. As she dances, Baby Doll imagines the asylum to be a whore house that she and the other girls are forced to work in. In this reality, Cugino is their madam and Isaacs is their pimp. It is here that Baby Doll convinces her equally ludicrously named captives such as Sweet Pea, Blondie (it’s ironic because she’s a brunette), Rocket and Amber, that they need to plan an escape. From here, Baby Doll enters another level of reality where she is told by a wise man (Scott Glenn, the only actor who survives this mess intact) that she must collect five items in order to escape; a map, a knife, a key, fire and a fifth item that is a mystery. Cue the mindless action as Baby Doll (suddenly transformed into a warrior princess from The Matrix) fights off giant, robot samurais in order to secure her first item.
After each battle, Baby Doll is transported back to the whore house where we observe that she was only dancing her strangely entrancing dance. I don’t what could be so entrancing about her slowly and unevenly moving her hips while looking constipated, but I digress. Although by the time the third big action sequence rolled around, I would of rather watched Baby Doll’s whole “I gotta go poopie” dance instead of the video game mayhem that Snyder’s showed instead.
The different levels of reality make Sucker Punch sound like Inception, but there is a notable difference. Inception was a terrific film that made sense; Sucker Punch not so much. If the story is atrocious, the script itself is even worse. Although with the limited amount of dialogue in the film, the script must’ve been four pages. As uninvolving as the action sequences are, the scenes in between are even more vapid, filled with the worst dialogue ever. Those scenes play like a special episode of 90210, the 90’s version. If anything, Sucker Punch proves that Zack Snyder should never be allowed to write a story ever again.
As harsh as this review is, I think it important that you understand that I’m actually a fan of Snyder’s work. I loved both Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead and thought Legend of the Guardians was highly underrated. I’m not a fan of 300, but Sucker Punch makes the Gerard Butler epic look like Citizen Kane. I generally like Snyder’s visual style, but in this film it is way too over the top. I felt like I was trapped in a video game that I wasn’t controlling. As the battles escalate, Snyder has the girls fight more and more outlandish creatures, such as dragons, robot soldiers and various other ghouls and monsters. I was waiting for a robotic, zombie King Kong to jump on screen any moment. I did like the set design however. It had blimps and I like blimps.
The film can be best summed up with a mathematical equation. Showgirls plus Kill Bill plus The Matrix plus Inception starring scantily clad hotties equals crap. As a thirteen year old boy without internet, I probably would’ve watched the movie every night for about ten minutes, if you get my drift, but otherwise this film is not worth watching at all. I feel like I was sucker punched.