Zack Snyder‘s latest visual feast is his most divisive film yet, which is saying a lot. To clarify, this makes Watchmen seem safe and overly commercial in comparison. Sucker Punch is the type of film that will garner both violent hatred and unabashed love, with very few reactions falling in the middle-ground.
If Alice in Wonderland were made today with our unhinged pop-culture sensibilities, this is what we would get. Sucker Punch feels like an overloaded mash-up of manga, anime, video games, and comic books. The storyline even follows a video game structure, in the typical sense, which some will undoubtably criticize.
After being thrown into a insane asylum by her not-so-friendly stepfather, Babydoll (Emily Browning) quickly creates an alternate reality for herself and a mission. Her mission is to escape with her fellow inmates: Sweat Pea (the imposing Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung). In reality, which is by no means a “real world,” Babydoll is attempting to escape her impending doom: a lobotomy.
Level one, Babydoll’s actual world, is rarely seen outside the first and last five minutes of the film. Level two – it’s best to refer to them as “levels” – is the main alternate reality she creates. Her and the girls are locked up in a brothel in this version. Instead of Babydoll fighting off a lobotomy, in this environment she’s faced with losing her virginity and innocence from the High Roller (Jon Hamm, who’s also the doctor in level one that is coming to perform the lobotomy).
To further escape this also doomed imagined reality, Babydoll creates another world, one which the girls enter via dancing. This is where the video-game storytelling comes into play. In this action-oriented level, Babydoll most collect five items, as stated by the expository Wise Man (Scott Glenn). The items are as follows: a key, a map, fire (ie, a lighter), a knife, and the final item is a mystery. The girls must work together, both in level two and three, to retrieve the items in order to escape.
Level three is where the film flies. There its only mission is to be a highly-stylized and ass-kicking action film, and Snyder and co. succeed on all fronts in that universe. By now, it’s a well-known fact that Snyder is a through and through professional when it comes to his set pieces. To no surprise, every action beat in Sucker Punch is distinct and improves upon the last.
When the film is aspiring to be more than balls to the wall and heightened action, things get messy, but also more interesting. The leads of the film could not be more sexualized, and Snyder doesn’t have leads looking sexy for the sake of looking sexy either; he’s clearly sending a message. This is a message for all those Comic-Con attending nerds who shout to actresses how “hot” they are when they light up the stage, and how gross and sexist that is. Snyder didn’t set out to make a film about sexy women doing cool stunts (although the film works on that level) but how men in geek culture love seeing oppressed girls on film and them dressed in degrading ways, as long as they’re enjoying it. This is a commentary on the sad little minds of sexually hungry and fetishistic nerds, who generally look like the Chef and Mayor in this film.
It’s concepts like that which make Sucker Punch work better than it should. Make no mistake, this embodies everything that skeptics criticize Snyder for. This is the auteur at his most unhinged. If one doesn’t allow himself to dig past the stylized surface, then he’ll see nothing but hollowness and vacancy. But for those willing to dig deeper, Sucker Punch will be a rewarding experience, and certainly better than the average action film. With a tighter and more focused script, Snyder perhaps could have achieved his fullest intentions, but thankfully he still managed to make an ambitious piece of filmmaking loaded with more than a few unique ideas packed inside its messy and unworldly mind.