Climbing Higher Pictures

To be honest, you’ve probably already made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to see Sucker Punch. It’s visual style and disregard for conventional storytelling either rubs you the right way, or it doesn’t, and nothing the marketing campaign can do will make you more or less excited to see it. It is, however, an original idea, and in a Hollywood system obsessed with franchises and name recognition, it’s nice to know that they will still take a chance every once in a while. Should you see it? I’ll let you be the judge.

SuckerPunch Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: C

As a reviewer, there are always going to be times where you’re faced with a film that doesn’t align with your personal grading rubric. I’ve always been vocal in my belief that I will consider a film on the basis of the goals it sets out for itself, judging if it’s a success based on its own merits, not necessarily what constitutes my personal ideals of great cinema. This is what allows me to give fun, entertaining flicks good marks, because they aren’t trying to be anything more, and therefore I don’t consider them the failure that some critics enjoy making them out to be.

Given all that, what can I do with Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch? It’s a film that completely succeeds in being an off-the-wall action crammed spectacle, but I recognize that as a whole, it’s not what many would call “good.” It exists in a genre classification that’s never really been used before, the music video musical. Instead of the characters breaking out into song (though the actresses do provide the vocals for the various covers that make up the pulsing soundtrack) they fight hordes of mythical, fantasy, or sci-fi baddies standing between them and their metaphorical goals. Each segment plays like the biggest budget and most visually mind-blowing music video you’ve ever seen, with the common album themes being girls in skimpy outfits with guns and other weapons mowing people down. You’d be right to ask yourself why stereotypical teenage boy fantasies are the dream worlds of female characters, but if you go too far down that train of thought the whole exercise unravels. As a musical, the cliché and over emotional dialogue sequences that pepper the connecting tissue make sense, but as a film, they feel at odds with what Snyder’s real intent seems to be… the kind of rollercoaster that leaves the viewer reeling and most likely popping Advils for the headache they’ve received.

In some ways it’s a similar problem that other pieces of intense genre fare like Sin City had in their first 20 minutes. The world and the visuals are so fresh and new that the audience is left scrambling for a foothold to be able to properly frame the experience. With Sin City, it takes a first-time viewer until the middle of Clive Owen’s story to really start to jive with what Robert Rodriguez created, and once you’re in, the whole movie becomes incredibly rewarding. I would say that the biggest flaw of Sucker Punch is that in never really lets you in, only allowing a brief glimpse at what its real storytelling strengths are by the final moments. I’d be interested to see it again, mostly to try and figure out if that familiar fleeting feeling I experienced towards the middle of the third act was enough to break the walls of expectation that serve to make most of the film a vibrant yet inscrutable piece of flair.

You’re probably going to hear a lot about how the film does or does not manage to resonate with its audiences. Any person who attempts to boil the movie down to “a videogame” is simply demonstrating how little they know of videogames. In videogames, there are stakes at play. Sure, dying only greets you with a “Game Over” screen, but that still doesn’t make your desire to lose any greater. The fantasy sequences of Sucker Punch lack their punch simply because we know what they are. By seeing the “real” world, the stylized world, and the fantasy world, we know that there isn’t any chance the characters will come to harm from the Steampunk Nazis or the Robot Mechs. There’s no danger, and that’s why I like to think of them as music videos instead of set-piece action sequences. You’re left in a completely observatory position, and the filmmakers compensate by constantly one-upping their art direction creativity. It’s pure spectacle, and make no mistake, Snyder can handle spectacle. There are easily several dozen moments in this film that you’ve never seen on screen before, and that may be enough for younger audiences to get a kick out of the movie. The rest of us, those poor character-development valuing types, will have to wait for something meatier to come our way.

Walking out of the theater, head still vibrating on some unknown frequency between slow motion and high speed editing, I have to say that I’m not very concerned about Snyder’s upcoming Superman reboot. Why am I not concerned? Because he’s not writing it, and given a script or a story by people who take the time to invest the audience in their characters, I think he’ll pull off one of the most awe inspiringly epic superhero films of all time. He really does know his way around a visual effects sequence, and my biggest gripe with Superman Returns was how underwhelming its sense of scale was. Sucker Punch is the kind of work that defies easy description, and it’s clear that he’s been working up to making it for much of his career. Should it bomb out, its unclear how Warnerbros. will handle the backlash, though allowing it to be made at all is an incredible demonstration of faith in Snyder’s future as a director. If you choose to give it a shot, you will certainly get your money’s worth, even though you may find yourself desperately grasping for an experience that could’ve been so much more.