I guess it’s come to this. Like many other column writers here, it looks like my time has come to move on and graduate on to bigger and better things. Looking back through the Iron Warrior archives, I found that I’ve written a total of 23 of these reviews based on their trailers, a sizeable amount for a pretty simple idea. Throughout my little run, I’ve ranted about the childishness of some movies and praised cartoons meant for children. However, this is the first movie I’ve looked at where I actually feel too old to see it. I guess it’s one of those signs of getting older.
Sucker Punch is the latest creation from the guy that brought you a fair number of Whiz-bang, big hype movies of the last few years. Remember the buzz around 300? It was massive and it still is massive. It sprouted a whole bunch of memes, made time-shifting fight scenes interesting again after everyone and Big Momma’s House had a Matrix-inspired bullet-dodging fight. It turned a few of my very straight (a little too straight if you ask me) friends gay, and everyone needed to rush out and get a new set of 16-pack abs. Remember the buzz around The Watchmen? Yeah, people saw it, but it really wasn’t the cultural tour-de-force that 300 was. People on the whole saw it, enjoyed it and moved on. Maybe someone was Rorschach for Halloween – I can’t really remember – but it reached nowhere near the level of popularity as 300. It seems to me that the same drop in popularity, from 300 to Watchmen, will be seen from Watchmen to Sucker Punch.
Let’s give a little rundown of the plot for those unaware. Cute girl gets sent away to an insane asylum. Is she wrongfully convicted? Probably, but who knows? She gets sent to the meanest looking all-girls looney bin this side of Transylvania where she’s abused and locked up and apparently due to get a good ole lobotomy. So what is a gal to do? Escape in her mind, of course! Inside her mind she, along with the other inmates, fight voracious baddies like a giant dragon, mecha-samurais and weird 1940’s contraptions from Nazi fiction. Does she escape? Is there a happy ending? Well, that’s not for the trailer to tell us, silly. You have to find out when you watch!
What’s wrong with that premise? We have fights, explosions and hot chicks: what more does your simple male-mind need, oh author? I don’t know, it just seems so… slapdash. Like the masturbatory fantasy of a 14-year old anime fan with no access to the internet, this movie tries to combine too many cool things that they end up so juvenile. Hot girls with kitanas fighting giant fire-breathing reptiles may seem cool to our little brothers, but it just feels a tad flaky at this age. And where the previous movies had those well-painted, intense scenes, such as running the men off the cliff in 300, there doesn’t seem to be the same development in Sucker Punch. Instead of revelling in the scene around us, director Zack Snyder decided just to pile on another layer of what he thinks is cool. “Oh, well you think samurais with miniguns is cool, well here’s a giant Nazi robot. Think that’s cool? Well now we’re fighting futuristic cyborgs!” As a result, the battles seem cheapened and flimsy, the main girls seem too invulnerable and, as a result, one-dimensional. There isn’t an apparent flow, oh, oh, oh and the dialogue is hella cheesy to boot.
Does it look pretty like the other films? Yes, but. All the trailer has is action whizzing by us, so you can’t pick up on the graphical style that made Snyder’s other movies seem incredibly rich. Sucker Punch is just too spastic for its own good, and unless the movie is about 3 hours long (it’s only 2), it doesn’t seem like the scenes shown can be put in the same movie without tripping over each other. Despite my appreciation, I wasn’t really a fan of Snyder’s other films. They were entertaining eye-candy that ended up looking frail and undernourished. Sucker Punch seems to be in the same vein and then some. Add some more incoherence for the sake of some teenager to sweatily exclaim “Oh man, just like my fan-fiction!”, and you have the making of a beautiful mess.
Can you sit through it? Will you be entertained? Again: yes, but. Yes, but there isn’t much going on upstairs of this movie. Yes, but you’ll probably walk out of the theatre wondering what the hell happened. Yes, but there are better movies out there. It’s a movie to skip, or at least one to go on Tuesdays when the theatre is cheap. Sucker Punch waltzes into theatres on March 25.
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