The story embedded in Sucker Punch has its witty moments and the fantasy-within-a-fantasy setting allows for plenty of creativity, but that extra layer of escapism sends the theatricality and cohesion off on a tangent of no return. Director Zack Snyder has always excelled visually and here his eye for creatures, costumes and unique sights make Sucker Punch a visceral delight, at least until the cartoony action of little girls battling giant samurai demons bursts the credibility bubble.
The film opens with a series of continuous slow-motion sequences that result in a surprisingly polished introduction to the plight of young Baby Doll (Emily Browning). When her mother dies and leaves her estate to her two daughters instead of her scheming stepfather, Baby Doll’s attempt to save her younger sister from the abusive man ends in tragedy. Sent to the grimy gray Lennox house for mentally insane girls, Baby Doll has a mother five days before she is lobotomized thanks to shady dealings by her stepfather and a crooked stretcher bearer. Unable to cope with the torturous horrors of reality, she substitutes her true surroundings for that of a nightclub run by Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) and Madame Gorski (Carla Gugino).
Here the girls lead a slightly more dignified life by offering their dancing talents to the “prestigious” guests of the establishment. Knowing her time is short, Baby Doll formulates a plan to break out of her prison with the help of her fellow dancers Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung). . Retreating further into her mind to acquire the items needed to escape, Baby Doll and her band of determined heroines must wage a desperate war for liberation against gigantic samurai, mechanized soldiers, massive dragons and, ultimately, their real-life captors. .
With 300 and Watchmen, Snyder has shown his propensity for knowing what’s “cool,” but here he seems to have let teenage fantasies and video game spectacle take over the plot. While the abundance of slow-motion moments may add to the quirkiness, the confusing clash of time periods, genres, and pop culture concoctions combine with the over-the-top action sequences to betray an overall silliness throughout the fantasy world. To acquire a map, Baby Doll and her minions must fight their way through WWII trenches filled with steam-powered Nazi zombies as fighter jets and airships swarm the skies.
At your disposal are machine guns, grenades, samurai swords, axes and, of course, martial arts combat. And that’s just the first mission. “Overboard” is an understatement and when subsequent skirmishes find the camera panning around the action more times than you can possibly roll your eyes at excessive hand-to-hand maneuvers, someone clearly has an overactive imagination. . If Dorothy and Alice woke up in Wonderland, which turned out to be the Matrix, there probably wouldn’t be nearly as many mindless mixes of chaos as found in Sucker Punch.
The biggest stumbling block behind Baby Doll’s escape from her already distorted perception of reality lies in her lack of cohesion with the rest of her environment and her unexplained origins. Why would a girl’s escapist fantasy involve schoolgirl outfits, steampunk zombies, and fire-breathing dragons? Sucker Punch may claim to be Baby Doll’s dream world, but it’s clearly Zack Snyder’s fantasy.
-Joel Massie