'Sucker Punch' and the 'Kick-Ass' Effect
A former child star, Jena Malone declared “emancipation” from her parents at age 14, so she’s no softie. But until Sucker Punch, the 25-year-old actress never made a movie that required so much physical toughness and overt sexuality. Jena and her Sucker Punch castmates (including two other former child actresses, Emily Browning and Vanessa Hudgens) trained for eight months to play heroines who dress like strippers but fight like ninjas. Swinging swords, firing bazookas, stabbing, slashing, kicking and machine-gunning robotic bad guys into oblivion, they wreak havoc while dressed in fishnet stockings, high heels and corsets.
The girls of Sucker Punch at the film's LA premiere, from oldest to youngest:
Jena Malone, 26, Vanessa Hudgens, 22, and Emily Browning, 22
“We’d do four hours every morning with stretch warm-ups, a little bit of mixed martial arts Wushu training,” Jena said of her workout regimen. “We’d take a 45-minute break, then do about three hours of weight training, take another break, then go into a firearms studio to fire off some guns and do tactical positioning. Then I’d go off and do a pole-dancing lesson and probably end the night with a wardrobe-fitting where I’d get into these corsets and garter belts.” The end result of all their work is a sight to behold, all the more impressive given that director Zack Snyder brought his music-driven slow-mo spectacle to life by transforming five actresses with zero action experience into convincingly menacing warriors.
The PG-13 Sucker Punch serves up violent set pieces sprung from the imagination of a character called Babydoll (Emily Browning, who was cast after the original actress Amanda Seyfried dropped out to do Red Riding Hood). Dispatched by a greedy uncle to an insane asylum that doubles as a brothel, Babydoll leads fellow inmates Amber, Sweet Pea, Blondie and Rocket (Jamie Chung, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens and Jena Malone) through a series of fantastic voyages spanning World War I, World War II, and outer-space environments. Jena’s runaway Rocket becomes the first to befriend the newcomer, after Babydoll saves her from being raped by a disgustingly corpulent cook.
In an interview with Wired.com, Jena said she appreciated Snyder’s eagerness to upend superhero conventions. “In most action movies, the men lead, and the women are either damsels in distress or complete sexpots who show no vulnerability whatsoever,” she said. “What’s so great about Zack is not just that he’s creating these genre-bending worlds we’ve never seen before, but he’s taking female characters into this surrealistic-action genre and showing that they have multiple dimensions.”
Sucker Punch represents biggest blow against Hollywood’s guy-heavy action formula in some time. Call it the Kick-Ass effect: Rebounding from years of neglect following benchmark work by Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft, fierce females regained some respect in 2010, thanks to Chloe Moretz’s jaw-dropping turn as the lethally acrobatic Hit Girl in Kick-Ass. Exercising a more subtle strain of empowerment, Hailee Steinfeld and Jennifer Lawrence both gave Oscar-nominated performances as tough-as-nails rural girls in True Grit and Winter’s Bone, without throwing a punch. Due out in April, Natalie Portman mocks medieval cliches as an ass-kicking princess in Your Highness, while teen Saoirse Ronan hits a more serious note as a young assassin in Hanna.
Jena Malone welcomes the trend toward giving battling babes a cinematic treatment once reserved for masculine action heroes, describing Sucker Punch’s five inmate-prostitute characters as “strong and sexy and also vulnerable. They’re fighting their demons and fears and kind of wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” she said. “Through their own imagination and willpower, and their own strength, these women basically end up saving themselves.” As for the skimpy costumes, Jena argues that the wardrobe makes sense within the context of the story. “In a brothel, what is a woman’s choice?” she said. “What tools do these girls have to fight with? They’re given lace and garter belts, and that’s what they have to use to demand control, power.”
Jena also welcomed the chance to go into attack mode in Sucker Punch, and recommends ass-kicking training for all females, whether they’re looking for a fight or not. “The first three weeks of training for Sucker Punch were the worst, toughest weeks of my life,” she said, “but once I became accustomed to the regimen, my body started craving it, my mind started craving it, muscles started pouring onto my body - it was sort of incredible. I recommend martial arts for all women, because it’s such a beautiful way to release aggression. To feel your body’s strength through movement and get that release of endorphins - that’s incredibly empowering.”