Originally posted on April 4, 2011, on AD Forums. Spoilers are marked in bold.
A little late to the party here, but I saw Sucker Punch the Sunday after it opened, in IMAX. It takes a lot to get me to shell out the additional money for something like that, especially since I'm trying to afford college right now, but Sucker Punch was something I'd been looking forward to since the first promo art came out sometime early last year. It looked like the kind of girl-power movie I'd been wishing would come out since, oh, forever. (We got so close to having a Sailor Moon movie in the 90s. The lack of box office success with Sucker Punch leads me to believe we will never have one now.) So I shelled out my bucks, knowing full well that Zack Snyder has disappointed me in many ways before, and his violent escapades have left me throwing up in many a movie theater toilet.
Maybe it's because of the things I was into when I was growing up - an ardent reader of not only Sailor Moon, but Revolutionary Girl Utena, Akira, and other films in the first wave of manga to hit America; the gritty works of Dark Age Frank Miller; even Spice Girls and the shrill dronings of other such fabricated bands - but this whole movie is impossible for me to describe because of the amount of strange nostalgia it gave me. To me, and girls from my era, this was very much as if someone took every five-girl sentai shojou show ever made, put it in the framework of the modern "realistic superhero" genre, and handed it to the world. There are real problems with the film, and I'll definitely cover them, but in my mind, Sucker Punch was a success, at least at conveying a mode that hasn't been well-done in American pop culture since Usagi Tsukino and her ilk first hit our shores.
Now, this movie, being a physical manifestation of many of my childhood fever dreams, had a lot of things that appealed to me. Emily Browning has always been a favorite actress of mine, ever since her impressive, haunted performance in A Series of Unfortunate Events (another series Sucker Punch owes a huge debt to, stylistically), and while acting is something that just does. not. happen. in this movie, she creates an impressive film presence. Everything about her fits the pseudo-anime vision Snyder's created, from her impossibly large green eyes, to her unnatural bleach blonde hair. While her oddly nauseated facial expressions before she "enters her dance" are unnerving, everything else about her appearance is vibrant, memorable, and fresh.
Speaking of visuals, this movie delivers them. By the truckload. There was so much going on, I'm pretty sure I missed some of it. No matter what you think of Snyder as a director, you have to admit, his work has style. The post-apocalyptic neo-punk visions created here, with their direct roots in modern anime cyberpunk and a heavy dash of video-game-esque sped-up fighting, are spectacular. Other sections of the film, especially those laden with odd dialogue about dancing and whoring or whatever, drag. The action does not. Which I suppose I should expect from Snyder, who's shown himself capable of nearly nothing else in earlier films.
Story-wise, nothing matches the opening sequence of Sucker Punch, which is probably the most powerful. The strains of Emily Browning's intensely sung 'Sweet Dreams' punctuate a stylistic portrayal of a poisoned relationship, and the film succeeds wholly in this opening, nearly dialogue-free, opening. It has a verve that most of the rest of the film is missing, and is an extremely excellent blend of visual panache and storytelling verve. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the film is missing this verve, save at the end, when we get kicked through three levels of dreamland and end up with Jon Hamm.
Which is where this movie either goes off the rails or reminds you of poorly structured shojo plots. The plot of this movie is episodic. Very episodic. Others here have likened it to a video game, which makes a bit of sense, but I was more reminded of one of the masterpieces of manga, Junko Mizuno's Pure Trance, which is every bit as episodic and visually stimulating as Sucker Punch. Pure Trance isn't a five-man sentai shojou, but it is one of the seminal works in underground manga, and details three generations of a family being tormented by the horrifically sadistic drug addict Director, who nominally runs a facility for tormented girls dealing with eating disorders. Pure Trance, like Sucker Punch, drags in a lot of plot-related areas, but its set pieces are of such bombastic intensity that you almost forget about the stretches of pointless weird (in Pure Trance's case) or clunky dialogue (in Sucker Punch's case).
As far as acting goes, as I said previously... there isn't much. Oscar Issac is batshit crazy, and I saw the movie over a week ago and STILL don't know if I liked it or if it was completely ridiculous. The only real standout is Jena Malone, who imbues her limited role with a lot more depth than this movie warranted. As a result, spoiler her death touched me far more than the others portrayed. Another interesting facet of Sucker Punch that Snyder uses from the sentai shojou show is the 'shocking death', which certainly fits for Ms. Malone's character. The other two deaths aren't nearly as successful. end spoiler The rest of the actors and actresses did relatively little - Jon Hamm remains a beacon of awesome in everything he does, and Carla Guigino has something interesting going on with her character that could've used some going into, but everyone else, especially the damn near useless Jamie Chung, stood around with their boobs popping out of their corsets, doing nothing.
Which is pretty much a hallmark of the sentai shojou genre. I really understand the criticisms being levied at this movie - the women are just sexualized objects and no amount of anti-male posturing can fix that, it's all style and no substance, it's episodic - but within the framework of a five-girl band narrative, these are constants. Sailor Moon wore hooker boots, for God's sake. As a film, divorced from any social context, Sucker Punch is an odd piece of modern moviemaking with seemingly contradictory messages and visuals. However, looking at it through the framework of a genre largely forgotten for brooding male superheroes, juvenile bodily-function-based comedy, and the wondrous beast that is the art film, Sucker Punch succeeds at being something much different: a throwback to the days where girl power was a hot topic, when anime wasn't just Naruto and whatever other boy-oriented action piece Shogakukan decided to shit out, and when little girls actually had superheroes to look up to and aspire to be, who fought for powerful abstracts like love, peace, justice, and, yes, freedom.
And damn all the problems, it was a relief to see I wasn't the only one aching for a return to women kicking ass.
***.5/*****
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