These days, we often hear complaints about how unoriginal Hollywood is. Movies are just the same old, same old, repeated ad nauseum. It’s stale. It’s formulaic.And then movies like “Sucker Punch” come out and remind us that those formulas exist for a reason-because they tend to work.
Meanwhile “Sucker Punch”-which tries its very hardest to be original and thought provoking-does not.
The movie (directed by Zach Snyder) is about a young girl (Emily Browning) who is committed to a mental institution. While waiting for a lobotomy, the girl flashes back on her time there, internally rewriting her experience as being trapped in a brothel and trying to escape.
While in her flashback, the girl-now called Baby Doll-further fantasizes herself into various action-movie clichés-storming a castle, fighting the Nazis, and sparring with robots, to name just a few.
Visually, it is a really enjoyable movie. Just about every scene is graphically appealing in an “awesome video game cut scene paired with ridiculous stripper outfits” kind of way.
Honestly, if they had cut the talking and loose attempt at plot entirely and just let the movie roll with the soundtrack (another high point, thanks to composers Tyler Bates and Marius De Vries, as well as several remixes and covers of old favorites), it probably would have been a better experience than it was.
But, of course, if your movie is something where the audience actually wants you to take away the plot so it doesn’t distract from the cool action poses, you’re probably doing something wrong.
And “Sucker Punch” does many, many things wrong. Mainly because it simply can’t make up its mind as to what it is, and so ends up falling flat across the board.
Is it a slick action movie? A philosophical thriller? A story of female empowerment? If you were to ask Snyder, he would probably say it is all these things.
If you were to ask a random audience member, they would probably say none.
It has so much going on that it ends up failing on every front. The action sequences don’t make sense. The psychological intrigue is never fully explained. The female empowerment, well, read the above statement about “ridiculous stripper outfits” to see how that one turned out.
It’s not that you can’t have a philosophical aspect to an action movie or vice versa and still be a decent movie; it’s just that in some cases, you have to realize that your movie isn’t “edgy”; it just lacks focus. “Sucker Punch” has no idea when to stop.
Here’s a hint: when you’ve reached the point where you have lobotomies, robots, exotic dancers, dragons, and mobsters all in the same two-hour movie, you should have stopped about an hour and forty-five minutes ago.