Sucker Punch

Developed specifically for the laziest of gamers, there's a new genre mashup video game in town that doesn't require the participant to push any buttons or even leave their seat. In fact, they don't even need to participate at all! That's because, for all of its fancy graphics, expansive soundscape, wooden dialogue, relentless action sequences, and attractive heroines saving the day in some sort of hyperkinetic ballet, the only player calling the shots in this game is Zack Snyder. Oh, and it's not actually a video game at all, but a movie. Although in Snyder's world, the line between the two is so bombastically blurred that such confusion is warranted.

This game (sorry, movie) is titled Sucker Punch and the shred of story that sets up the impending mayhem begins when protagonist Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is sent to a mental asylum by her overbearing stepfather in the wake of her mother's death. Upon arrival, Baby Doll is scheduled for a lobotomy and so, with her brain about to be no better than mush, she gathers four other girls in the asylum and retreats into a depraved fantasy where the asylum has been transformed into both a prison and a brothel. Of course, this new level of reality is still a pretty rotten place, so Baby Doll ends up sinking even deeper into a series of dreamscapes where she wields a katana in the face of such CGI creations as gun-toting samurai giants, fire-breathing dragons, and futuristic robots.

And she does it all without ever messing up her golden, pigtailed hair. This superhuman feat is achieved simply because Sucker Punch is Snyder's fetishistic fantasy masquerading as some sort of girl power diatribe. As a result, it's supremely stylized and entirely empty. It's not about Baby Doll surviving an onslaught of violence, but rather how incredibly sexy she can look while standing her ground. The allure of exploring the sexualized fascination with pretty girls in fisticuffs is intense and undeniable, so that Snyder chose to travel down this path after making mostly male-driven action flicks like 300 and Watchmen is not surprising.

The problem is that Snyder isn't interested in exploring anything other than Baby Doll's big, shiny, cherubic eyes. They're gorgeous, yes, but the way Snyder's camera drools over Browning's features reduces the movie to a flashy brand of sleazy entertainment. For Baby Doll's adventure to have dramatic pull and resonance, it is imperative that she be allowed to grow as a character. At the very least, she should be allowed to develop a personality as she simultaneously oozes sexuality in tight corsets, but even that proves too far outside of Snyder's game plan. So determined to pin down his heroine, he doesn't even allow Baby Doll to utter a single line of dialogue until she's well into the first act.

The hefty amount of time Browning spends sitting silently in front of the camera could be used to deepen her despair and strengthen her resolve (you know, character building stuff), but to Snyder, this is just another series of opportunities to capture Browning's beauty in close-up without her voice offering any unnecessary distractions. When Baby Doll first retreats into a fancy dreamscape where she faces off against the gigantic samurai creatures, Snyder is too busy capturing glamour shots to bother raising the potentially exciting stakes. Baby Doll never appears to be in much danger and when all the smoke clears at the end of this raucous action sequence, it feels more like a triumph of CGI and wirework than it does of a young woman facing her inner demons.

This sense of effects trumping character reverberates throughout the entire movie and it doesn't take long for Snyder's obsession with slow-motion shots of Baby Doll walking tough and tall to wear thin. At no point does Snyder exhibit an interest in allowing his protagonist to become anything more than the sum of her physical parts. The rest of the cast doesn't fare much better. Joining Baby Doll for a dive out of a helicopter or a dash through zombie-infested WWI trenches are Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung). The fearsome fivesome all have two things in common: they're beautiful and they're helpless pawns in Snyder's world.

Once the group of girls enter the various dreamscapes that make up the movie's most ridiculous moments, the video game comparison is almost impossible to ignore. Hordes of interchangeable monsters swarm the girls only to be shot, stabbed, or punched for five or ten minutes straight. Snyder certainly knows how to bring macho bravado to a blockbuster action sequence and his stylized approach does provide good fodder for a movie trailer. But in big chunks, it's all sort of repetitive and eventually exhausting. It's also stunningly stupid, because it never attempts to stretch beyond the boundaries of video game excitement, which is generally dictated by the joys of actually deciding what to do next and how to do it.

No such luck in Snyder's Sucker Punch, which even fills the moments between the fantasy action sequences with expository silliness that qualifies as the movie's equivalent of a time-wasting cutscene. What's a girl have to do to get a meaningful moment, a respectful character arc, a chance to be more than a sex object, or even a decent line of dialogue? Evidently, the answer is steer clear of Zack Snyder's set. To be fair, oddly enough, I think Snyder has some good intentions here. Sucker Punch is probably not meant to be nothing but his gawking ramblings and perhaps he really wants to say something about female empowerment in the midst of a hellish situation. But his execution is something else entirely and it erodes what little credibility his possible intentions lend to the movie.

Baby Doll and her group of friends are designed to be victims of male oppression (almost every male character is either physically or morally disgusting, if not both), but in an ironic twist, Browning and her castmates actually end up being victimized by Snyder. They're puppets in his loud, juvenile fantasy and they're never given any room to grow their characters. The performances from Browning, Cornish, Malone, Hudgens, and Chung are nothing particularly spectacular, but they're passable enough that it's a shame they weren't allowed to at least attempt something more. The rest of the performances range from enjoyable (Carla Gugino, sporting a silly accent and still managing to entertain with authenticity) to ear-splitting (Oscar Isaacs, playing a very loud and laughably unintimidating villain). But in Snyder's video game-saturated world, actors don't count for much and so Sucker Punch is always more interested in song choices and digital monsters than it is in actual performance. Of course, what it loves more than anything is Baby Doll, whose photogenic qualities apparently know no bounds. She's at the center of this disaster and she's never too far from some slow-motion theatrics. There's no doubt that Browning and her alter ego are easy on the eyes, but I only wish that Sucker Punch gave me a reason to care, instead of a simple excuse to stare.