Despite being out for barely two days, Sucker Punch is already proving to be a very polarizing movie. I was curious as to how audiences would react to it seeing how I was in fact really looking forward to it, but then the reviews came in. So far, the reaction to this movie has been decidedly mixed, with reactions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative, and I can see why. Sucker Punch is a movie that knows how to push fanboy buttons, and do it well, but as a movie as a whole it falls flat. I saw it with three other friends and the four of us were split down the middle on our opinions of it, and that seems to be the case all around. Needless to say, Sucker Punch is a movie that has "cult film" written all over it, but I think it's going to fall flat in the mainstream circuit.
Sucker Punch tells the story of Baby Doll, a young girl committed to a mental institution by her evil step-father. While there, she finds that the evil head doctor is using the girls in the asylum for his brothel he runs on the side (I guess, but more on that later) and she escapes into a fantasy world while also plotting her escape. On the surface, it sounds like Pan's Labyrinth but with more guns and explosions, and it's an idea that could have worked and given us something special. I was intrigued the first half hour or so of the movie, but then soon found myself...bored. Sucker Punch's key flaw is that it just doesn't engage the audience, and one main reason why is the fight scenes.
As I said earlier, Sucker Punch knows how to push geek buttons. You have hot girls in skimpy, anime attire, robots, dragons, orc, and steam punk Nazi zombies (yes, I thought that was an awesome idea too). The fight scenes are like something out of a video game: hot girls have to fight monsters to get to their objective, they even get a little briefing in the beginning and have to fight a boss at the end. The fight scenes are big, loud, and pretty, but they don't add anything to the movie. The best action movies, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Die Hard, Inception, all use the action scenes to advance the plot of the movie, something is always at stake to make us doubt if our heroes will win, but with Sucker Punch, the movie could have easily cut out the fight scenes and not missed a beat. The action scenes all take place in Baby Doll's head so there's no sense of danger, we know this isn't a real world so we never doubt if she's going to get killed by whatever monster she's up against. In the world, we see the characters nab whatever object their after, the map, lighter, etc, so we know they already have it so we don't need a big flashy action scene to show it again. The movie really just stops in it's tracks for these massive action scenes and I found myself sick of them after the second one.
These all leads to the big flaw that there is no sense of danger, nothing at stake. We're told that Baby Doll has five days until she gets lobotomized but we never get that sense of a ticking clock. The girls all go for the various items needed to escape, but they get them with all too much ease. The villains are so over the top that we never really fear them, and they really don't do anything dastardly, so we find ourselves not caring.
Another big flaw is the characters, or caricatures as they should be. All our heroes really are is hot, barely clothed girls, video game avatars going from point A to point B. Baby Doll, our main, character, really doesn't have anything to her other than to look concerned and tell everyone her plan. There could have been some great character guilt with the plant earlier in the movie that she accidentally killed her sister, but this is never brought up again. All the other supporting cast is just kinda "there", and one point one of them died and I barely batted an eye.
The line between reality and fantasy became a big debating point as well. Some of my friends thought that the whole thing with the asylum being used as a brothel was all in Baby Doll's head, and at times this does seem the case, but we're never given sufficient evidence to doubt or prove this. The time frame was another point of debate, because it seems to present a 1950's type feel but then plays modern music.
All in all, Sucker Punch really fell short of being something special. Zack Snyder has proven to be a capable director but I think he was just trying to do too many things with this: a women in prison movie, a fantasy, a video game movie, etc. I still have faith for the Superman movie because Snyder won't be doing the script, unlike with Sucker Punch. While this movie is big, pretty, and expensive, it's really nothing more than a teenage boy's fantasy come to life, complete with hot girls with no personalities fighting cool monsters.