Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
5/4/11
I like
to pride myself on “getting” movies, even when I don't. Which is
to say, whether or not I'm actually picking up what the filmmakers intend
to put down, I usually come out of everything I see with a pretty clear
notion of what I think it's about, what I think it's trying to say, and
how I think the filmmakers assembled their structure to accomplish those
two goals. So, if anybody I've scoffed at for claiming a movie I
went on and on about the thematic virtues of on this site “made no sense”
would care to enlighten me about what the hell is supposed to be going
on in Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, I will consider myself duly chastised.
Yes, here is a movie that truly does seem to make no sense at all, wrapping
itself in layer after layer of dream sequences, metaphors and alternate
realities all of which seem to simply be saying “hot chicks fighting Nazi
zombies are pretty damn cool”. And it's not that I don't tend to
agree with that assessment. Only thing is, since I can't tell who
the hell any of the people in Sucker Punch are supposed to be, what
possible reason there could be why they're doing any of what they're doing
and on what level any of it matters or even exists, it's hard for me to
get all that interested. Oh, I'll grant you, Sucker Punch
is never dull per se, it's far too loud and relentless for that.
But because its hero is a literal cypher and all of its levels of dream/fantasy/delusion
cleverly dodge analysis by having no rhyme or reason, I mostly just spent
its two hour running time trying, and failing, to figure out what the hell
was going on. Give it this much: if you walked into the theater
with three minutes to go, you'd think you'd just missed something pretty
damn amazing. But you'd be wrong.
In
opening narration you'd better listen to closely if you're to have any
hope of comprehending what follows, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) tells us
how guardian angels are real, and when we refuse to believe in them or
take their advice (or something...), they look for other ways to keep us
out of harm's way. This may or may not have something to do with
a girl we'll only ever know as Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who is dragged
away to a mental institution by her evil Stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) after
he murders her baby sister and possibly her mother. Since Baby Doll
inherits the family fortune, he's got to get her out of the way, and a
deal with corrupt orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) guarantees she'll be
lobotomized by a visiting Doctor (Jon Hamm) in a week's time. A moment
before he pounds the icepick into her brain, we flash back/sideways/something
into an alternate version of the week that's just passed. Now Baby
Doll, Sweet Pea and their fellow patients are prostitutes who put on elaborate
dance shows for their would-be Johns in a burlesque version of the hospital.
They are choreographed by Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), their Doctor from
the hospital, who's also a prisoner of the evil Blue, who runs this place.
The first time Baby Doll is forced to dance for her captors, something
becomes clear: her dancing is so... something... that everyone who
watches is held spellbound. But while she's doing it, she herself
is inside yet another fantasy world, where the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) assigns
her tasks right out of video games that have presumably not yet been invented
in this retro sideways world. Baby Doll decides to use her... whatever...
as the key component of a plan to escape, enlisting the help of Sweet Pea's
sister Rocket (Jena Malone) and fellow inmates/captives Amber (Jamie Chung)
and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens). Baby Doll will distract whoever needs
distracting with her dance while the others steal the four key elements
they need to escape: a map, a lighter, a knife and, well, that would
be telling. Sweet Pea is resistant to the plan: she ended up
here trying to protect Rocket and would rather share a lifetime of imprisoned
suffering than risk her sister's life. But finally, she signed on
and the game is afoot. Each time they attempt a phase of the plan,
we follow Baby Doll into a metaphorical representation of it, fighting
Nazi zombies, trying to kill a dragon or to stop a runaway train filled
with explosives. All the other girls join her there and their fates
in one world seem to be tied to their fates in another. Can Baby
Doll and her new friends make it out before the High Roller (also Hamm)
steals her virtue/pounds a stake into her brain?
Yeah,
that's pretty much the dodgiest plot synopsis I've written for this site:
Sucker Punch is so hip deep in a desire to become the first movie
about a mental patient who thinks she's a prostitute who thinks she's a
samurai battling 12-foot monsters to win Best Picture that it really never
stops to contemplate how spectacularly incoherent it is. Oh, I can
certainly see what it wants to be about: mostly girl power and that
ability to draw strength from archtypical fantasies that actually worked
as a theme of Rango. But the problem is
that there's just no “there” there. In what way is being in a mental
institution like being a prostitute? Certainly Snyder can't possibly
be giving us a movie full of scantily-clad women blasting away at fantasy
monsters with big guns and claiming prostitution is a metaphor for the
female experience! At least not with a straight face. And how
are any of those fantasy sequences metaphors for captivity of any kind,
or even for surmounting any of life's obstacles? The opposition our
intrepid team of ass-kicking cyphers faces is so utterly undefined that
it represents nothing but a couple of promising levels for a Sucker
Punch video game made problematic by the fact that the movie doesn't
even make enough sense to BE a video game.
And
as for the whole Girl Power thing (SPOILER ALERT!), since a GUY
is presumably inside Sweet Pea's head setting her up to take the fall so
one of her friends can escape and be guided on her life's journey by that
same GUY, uh, you can see where I'm going with this, right? (END OF
SPOILERS). While I'm thinking of things that make this seem somewhat
less than a feminist manifesto, no matter how delusionally amped on up
hormones he is, has any guy ever looked at a beautiful woman dancing and
thought “when she dances, it's exactly like fighting off an army of Orcs
to face the dragon Boss at the center of a mighty castle!” Well,
I guess Zack Snyder has. And for that matter, if the plights of the
girls in the brothel are metaphors for those in the institution, how exactly
does one end up institutionalized for following their institutionalized
runaway sister onto the road? I understand that the mental health
system prior to the 1950's was a shocking and disgraceful enterprise, but
isn't anyone in this place genuinely mentally ill?
It
is true that Sucker Punch isn't quite as hard to watch as it is
to ruminate over once it's done: Snyder fills the screen with directorial
slight of hand (the opening shots in which a curtain rises on a stage that
is life and the camera pans around until we're fully immersed in that world
is a real show-stopper, as are those wonderfully crafted but ultimately
meaningless closing moments) and the action sequences are well-done except
for the fact that they really do exist only for their own sake. The
actors are as good as can be expected under the circumstances (and Cornish
and Malone are better than that), keeping us thinking this is all headed
someplace. I'd imagine the movie would be utterly unwatchable on
a second viewing, once you've been assured the emperor is looking more
than a little naked today.
Because
Sucker Punch is so wildly stylized and is whaling away on a few
hot-button issues, I'm sure it'll become more than a few people's instant
favorite movie. I expect term papers from those folks first thing
Monday morning, and I can't wait to hear what all this is supposed to mean. |
