‘Sucker Punch’ is too cool for its own good

Hot chicks. Does a movie need anything more? Sucker Punch doesn’t seem to think so.

By Josh Bell

Friday, March 25, 2011 | 3 p.m.

The frustrating thing about Zack Snyder is that unlike a lot of other big-budget action-movie auteurs (say, Michael Bay or Tony Scott), he has genuine artistic ambition and personal vision, and yet it almost always comes across as a loud, punishing mess. Snyder is so focused on demonstrating how cool his movies are that he loses sight of plot and characterization, creating a series of self-consciously “awesome” moments that don’t add up to anything. His latest, Sucker Punch, is probably the apogee of this phenomenon. Snyder’s first movie not based on existing source material, Punch is instead an amalgamation of practically every fanboy-culture touchstone: Hot chicks in skimpy outfits kicking ass! Dragons! Robots! Steampunk zombie cyborgs! Samurais with machine guns! Rap-rock mash-ups! By throwing in every pandering element he can think of, Snyder has created a cluttered cacophony rather than the inspired genre melding he seems to think he’s pulled off.

The Details

Sucker Punch

Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone

Directed by Zack Snyder

Rated PG-13

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: Sucker Punch

Rotten Tomatoes: Sucker Punch

For stretches of three or four minutes at a time, Punch can be breathtaking: Snyder makes good use of his sometimes overbearing soundtrack, and the best sequences are like little music videos, free of dialogue or the obligation to make sense. But dozens of those strung together over the course of nearly two hours becomes numbing, and any time the movie slows down for dialogue or plot development, it reveals just how deficient in those areas Snyder (who wrote the screenplay with Steve Shibuya) really is. Punch is more of a surreal fantasia than a linear narrative anyway, structured around a heroine known as Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who finds herself trapped in a decrepit insane asylum awaiting a lobotomy.

Or is she? Baby Doll imagines herself in (or is transported to) a brothel/nightclub where she and other girls are kept as sex slaves by a sadistic pimp/impresario, and there she hatches a plan to escape with four of her fellow hot, scantily clad inmates/prostitutes (played, in descending order of importance, by Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung). Each time Baby Doll needs to collect one of the items essential for escape, she imagines herself in (or is transported to) some kind of fantasy world, whose lack of rules or coherent logic allows Snyder to indulge in all the jumbled action-movie nonsense he can’t seem to get enough of.

But these sequences, as essentially pure fantasy, have no stakes and no suspense, and feel like watching someone else play a visually assaultive video game. Instead of integrating his various influences into something thrilling and new, like Edgar Wright did in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or Quentin Tarantino did in Kill Bill, Snyder just crams them all together whether they fit or not, bombarding the viewer until the only option is to admit defeat. And Browning fails as an anchor to the story, with blank looks and apathetic delivery robbing her character of any meaningful resonance. Sucker Punch looks great in snapshots, but those moments only accumulate into empty posturing.