Sucker Punch: A review
Damn, but this movie is profoundly stupid. Spoilers ahead.
OK, look, I know; I like stupid movies. I loved Hudson Hawk, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist and Dude, Where's My Car? So why would I say Sucker Punch is stupid in so obviously a negative tone? I'll tell you why; because it doesn't think it's stupid. Look, Hudson Hawk is painfully stupid at times, but it embraces the stupidity. When Tommy shows up after having been locked in a car falling off a cliff, he only says, "Air bags! Can you fuckin' believe it?" And Eddie just says, "Yeah! That's probably what happened!" I even love Tank Girl (apologies if you're a fan of the comic; I'm not), which is actually somewhere in the vicinity of this movie's genre, if it can be said to have one, and that ends with... well, quite honestly, I'm not sure what the hell is happening in the ending, but Malcolm MacDowell is dead and it's turned into a cartoon where she and Booga ride a missile like in Dr. Strangelove and then... go... swimming? Whatever; earlier in the movie she defeated a brothel-owner by making her sing Cole Porter songs, so just let it ride. It honestly doesn't matter as long as it's fun, which it was.
Sucker Punch, however, thinks it's a serious movie; it sets us up for real drama then delivers us into the fevered doodlings of an absent-minded kid in social studies class. It's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as written by Calvin and Hobbes.
An unnamed blonde girl (who we'll come to know later as Baby Doll), upon her mother's death, is attacked by her stepfather, who'd just learned that she and her sister received everything in the will. When he gives up on her, he goes after her little sister, prompting the older sister to fetch a gun and shoot him. She is apparently a terrible shot, since aiming at him from point blank range she manages to hit a light bulb above him and her little sister behind him. When she doesn't kill him, he has her committed to a mental hospital only slightly less creepy than Dracula's castle. Up to this point, almost no words have been spoken, and half the film so far has been slow-motion closeups of things. As it was happening I thought it was supposed to look arty, but in retrospect I think the director felt so bound by having to film something that wasn't over-the-top ultraviolence performed by impractically-dressed young girls that he had to do SOMETHING to make this movie pop!
Now there's talking; a slimy orderly takes a bribe from the stepfather to forge a doctor's signature and get Baby Doll lobotomized in a week. We know all this because they discuss it in no uncertain terms right in Baby Doll's goddamn ear. To be fair, it's hard to say the villains here are so blatant because Baby Doll perceives them as flagrantly corrupt and working with virtual impunity under the nose of incompetent management -- a statement on medical practices during the '60s, perhaps? -- or because the director has never even heard of anyone who has ever been subtle in their lives.
There's a moment of suspense when we think Baby Doll is about to be lobotomized, but they kill that by changing genres. It becomes clear fairly soon that Baby Doll is retreating into multilayered fantasies and delusions; layer one is reality -- the mental hospital -- and it's at this point that layer two starts, which is kind of an old-timey brothel, I think? All the girls who were just a moment ago mental patients are now hookers who also work as dancers and scullery maids. Her stepfather is now a priest, the slimy orderly is now the slimy club owner and the lobotomy doctor is now the "high roller," a man who will come to get Baby Doll at the end of the week. One of the girls (they all have nicknames, no real names; we meet Sweet Pea, her sister Rocket, then Amber and Blondie -- who is not blonde) shows her around, ending at the dance hall, where the layer one doctor is a layer two dance instructor, who tells Baby Doll that in order to make it around here, she's got to dance.
Baby Doll steps up to dance, and a fraction of a second before she would start moving, layer three begins. She's in front of a Japanese temple, and inside meets a man who would totally have been David Carradine if he hadn't been dead when filming started. The man gives her a quest; take this katana and .45 Magnum, then go get a map, fire, a knife and a key. We saw all of these things in layer one, so it wasn't really any mystery where she'd get them. There's also a fifth item, a "mystery" that "only you can find" and "will require a great sacrifice." Then she fights three giant samurai; one with a naginata, one with a rail gun and one with a katana and wakizashi. She wins, and it's back to layer two, where everyone around her behaves as though her dancing revealed the second coming of Elvis.
This sets the pattern; the girls all agree to help her escape by collecting her items while she dances, which she assures us will distract anyone for long enough to do so. So she dances and one of the girls steals a list item, and they apparently are so bad at it that immediately after they start the slimy club owner realizes what's happening. The scene where he notices his copier is warm, then sees that the thumbtack on the blueprint of the building he inexplicably keeps over his desk has been moved just shows that he read the script. Every time this pattern plays out, it becomes another over-the-top battle scene in layer three with all five of the girls in ridiculous clothing and carrying huge weapons. I'm going to be totally honest here; as stupid as this stuff is, these scenes are really cool. I enjoyed all of them, though the last one, where they're trying to retrieve the bomb codenamed "kitchen knife" was a bit lackluster and probably shouldn't have been the last of them.
After this, the club owner comes to their dressing room, yells a lot, then shoots two of the girls in the head in front of everyone. Considering that he's been wearing the key around his neck the whole time, it might have been nice if layer 2 Baby Doll had shown even an iota of the heroism she lugs around with her in layer three and maybe, I don't know, tried to stop it? When he sends everyone away so he can have his way with Baby Doll, she stabs him with the knife, steals the key around his neck, rescues the remaining girl from solitary confinement and the two of them escape, only to have a bunch of guys standing in front of the gate. At some point in this sequence, the story reverts back to layer one. This is when Baby Doll realizes that she was the mystery item. I know. That's the big reveal; that Baby Doll had to give herself up so others could escape. She even stands up and says, "I'm not the main character of this story; you are." Then she goes and gets herself caught so the remaining girl can escape.
This is what started pissing me off. No, Baby Doll; you're the protagonist. All three layers of reality have been about you, all the fantasies have been yours, and you're the only character with actual background with whom anyone could conceivably sympathize. Sweet Pea, the lone dissenter when you announced the plan, is not the main character; she's support at best. Looking at everything we've just watched through the lens of our main character being someone other than our protagonist just renders every single moment of film utterly pointless. The longer I thought about it, the more the movie just irritated me, until the awesome was completely overwhelmed by the annoying.
Like I said, I enjoy stupid movies, and I was enjoying this one until after an over-the-top exercise in explodey excess, it then turned to me and asked thoughtfully to consider the philosophical psycho-sexual ramifications of a girl in a Catholic school outfit cutting a dude in half with a samurai sword. No; your mental masturbations are not mindblowing, so please don't spend two hours picking your nose and then tell me you've found the secret of the universe, because all it makes me want to do is slap the shit out of whoever took you seriously enough to let you make this movie.
OK, look, I know; I like stupid movies. I loved Hudson Hawk, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist and Dude, Where's My Car? So why would I say Sucker Punch is stupid in so obviously a negative tone? I'll tell you why; because it doesn't think it's stupid. Look, Hudson Hawk is painfully stupid at times, but it embraces the stupidity. When Tommy shows up after having been locked in a car falling off a cliff, he only says, "Air bags! Can you fuckin' believe it?" And Eddie just says, "Yeah! That's probably what happened!" I even love Tank Girl (apologies if you're a fan of the comic; I'm not), which is actually somewhere in the vicinity of this movie's genre, if it can be said to have one, and that ends with... well, quite honestly, I'm not sure what the hell is happening in the ending, but Malcolm MacDowell is dead and it's turned into a cartoon where she and Booga ride a missile like in Dr. Strangelove and then... go... swimming? Whatever; earlier in the movie she defeated a brothel-owner by making her sing Cole Porter songs, so just let it ride. It honestly doesn't matter as long as it's fun, which it was.
Sucker Punch, however, thinks it's a serious movie; it sets us up for real drama then delivers us into the fevered doodlings of an absent-minded kid in social studies class. It's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as written by Calvin and Hobbes.
An unnamed blonde girl (who we'll come to know later as Baby Doll), upon her mother's death, is attacked by her stepfather, who'd just learned that she and her sister received everything in the will. When he gives up on her, he goes after her little sister, prompting the older sister to fetch a gun and shoot him. She is apparently a terrible shot, since aiming at him from point blank range she manages to hit a light bulb above him and her little sister behind him. When she doesn't kill him, he has her committed to a mental hospital only slightly less creepy than Dracula's castle. Up to this point, almost no words have been spoken, and half the film so far has been slow-motion closeups of things. As it was happening I thought it was supposed to look arty, but in retrospect I think the director felt so bound by having to film something that wasn't over-the-top ultraviolence performed by impractically-dressed young girls that he had to do SOMETHING to make this movie pop!
Now there's talking; a slimy orderly takes a bribe from the stepfather to forge a doctor's signature and get Baby Doll lobotomized in a week. We know all this because they discuss it in no uncertain terms right in Baby Doll's goddamn ear. To be fair, it's hard to say the villains here are so blatant because Baby Doll perceives them as flagrantly corrupt and working with virtual impunity under the nose of incompetent management -- a statement on medical practices during the '60s, perhaps? -- or because the director has never even heard of anyone who has ever been subtle in their lives.
There's a moment of suspense when we think Baby Doll is about to be lobotomized, but they kill that by changing genres. It becomes clear fairly soon that Baby Doll is retreating into multilayered fantasies and delusions; layer one is reality -- the mental hospital -- and it's at this point that layer two starts, which is kind of an old-timey brothel, I think? All the girls who were just a moment ago mental patients are now hookers who also work as dancers and scullery maids. Her stepfather is now a priest, the slimy orderly is now the slimy club owner and the lobotomy doctor is now the "high roller," a man who will come to get Baby Doll at the end of the week. One of the girls (they all have nicknames, no real names; we meet Sweet Pea, her sister Rocket, then Amber and Blondie -- who is not blonde) shows her around, ending at the dance hall, where the layer one doctor is a layer two dance instructor, who tells Baby Doll that in order to make it around here, she's got to dance.
Baby Doll steps up to dance, and a fraction of a second before she would start moving, layer three begins. She's in front of a Japanese temple, and inside meets a man who would totally have been David Carradine if he hadn't been dead when filming started. The man gives her a quest; take this katana and .45 Magnum, then go get a map, fire, a knife and a key. We saw all of these things in layer one, so it wasn't really any mystery where she'd get them. There's also a fifth item, a "mystery" that "only you can find" and "will require a great sacrifice." Then she fights three giant samurai; one with a naginata, one with a rail gun and one with a katana and wakizashi. She wins, and it's back to layer two, where everyone around her behaves as though her dancing revealed the second coming of Elvis.
This sets the pattern; the girls all agree to help her escape by collecting her items while she dances, which she assures us will distract anyone for long enough to do so. So she dances and one of the girls steals a list item, and they apparently are so bad at it that immediately after they start the slimy club owner realizes what's happening. The scene where he notices his copier is warm, then sees that the thumbtack on the blueprint of the building he inexplicably keeps over his desk has been moved just shows that he read the script. Every time this pattern plays out, it becomes another over-the-top battle scene in layer three with all five of the girls in ridiculous clothing and carrying huge weapons. I'm going to be totally honest here; as stupid as this stuff is, these scenes are really cool. I enjoyed all of them, though the last one, where they're trying to retrieve the bomb codenamed "kitchen knife" was a bit lackluster and probably shouldn't have been the last of them.
After this, the club owner comes to their dressing room, yells a lot, then shoots two of the girls in the head in front of everyone. Considering that he's been wearing the key around his neck the whole time, it might have been nice if layer 2 Baby Doll had shown even an iota of the heroism she lugs around with her in layer three and maybe, I don't know, tried to stop it? When he sends everyone away so he can have his way with Baby Doll, she stabs him with the knife, steals the key around his neck, rescues the remaining girl from solitary confinement and the two of them escape, only to have a bunch of guys standing in front of the gate. At some point in this sequence, the story reverts back to layer one. This is when Baby Doll realizes that she was the mystery item. I know. That's the big reveal; that Baby Doll had to give herself up so others could escape. She even stands up and says, "I'm not the main character of this story; you are." Then she goes and gets herself caught so the remaining girl can escape.
This is what started pissing me off. No, Baby Doll; you're the protagonist. All three layers of reality have been about you, all the fantasies have been yours, and you're the only character with actual background with whom anyone could conceivably sympathize. Sweet Pea, the lone dissenter when you announced the plan, is not the main character; she's support at best. Looking at everything we've just watched through the lens of our main character being someone other than our protagonist just renders every single moment of film utterly pointless. The longer I thought about it, the more the movie just irritated me, until the awesome was completely overwhelmed by the annoying.
Like I said, I enjoy stupid movies, and I was enjoying this one until after an over-the-top exercise in explodey excess, it then turned to me and asked thoughtfully to consider the philosophical psycho-sexual ramifications of a girl in a Catholic school outfit cutting a dude in half with a samurai sword. No; your mental masturbations are not mindblowing, so please don't spend two hours picking your nose and then tell me you've found the secret of the universe, because all it makes me want to do is slap the shit out of whoever took you seriously enough to let you make this movie.