Brief thoughts on Sucker Punch
I can forgive people for reading the synopsis and thinking that Sucker Punch is a horrendous mash of a male teen sci-fi/sex fantasy, but it’s not that at all.
It’s also not all that good.
Let me re-phrase: it’s not Transformers 2 bad, but it’s disappointing because it could have been so much more. The opening scenes are engaging, the acting is for the most part quite good. And it does some good stuff, but not enough, and not coherently enough.
On the mysogeny thing.
I didn’t get that at all. Sure there’s scantily glad girls, often with swords and guns, but to me they were never sexualised. That sounds stupid given they work in a brothel. The best way I can explain it was that they were sexualised from the view of other characters in the film, but not the audience. That’s because it’s completely impossible to feel any empathy for the male characters.
It’s a girl power film, albeit a clumsy one. It plays too heavily on the Evil Male Oppressor vs Female Victim Finding Empowerment cliche.
About 1/3rd of the way in (when Shit Really Starts To Get Crazy) I was thinking “if he pulls this off, it could be a remarkable film”. But really, 1/3rd of the way in I houldn’t have been thinking about the film at all. In Black Swan I was hooked from about 10 minutes in and didn’t think (and barely breathed) until about 20 minutes after I left the cinema.
Sucker Punch had that potential. Or atleast the potential to be a Sin City. But where those (and hell, most great) movies made more sense and they went on, this unravelled until it was ludicrous.
I didn’t mind the crazy inner fantasy scenes – they served their purpose, though the did become a bit repetitive. But I did mind the telegraphing of the ending in the first 20 minutes. And the attempt to to tie shit together that just doesn’t make sense. And the long-arse monologues that make even less sense than the action.
I loved Watchmen and 300, and I admire the unique insane vision of this film. I like crazy films, but crazy is hard to pull off. I didn’t really care about what happened to the characters, in any of their realities. And the ending neither resolved enough to be satisfying or left enough unresolved to be disturbing.
Edit
Re-reading this this morning, it sounds as though I liked the film less than I did. I really enjoyed the look, feel and sound of it: cinematically it worked very well. I just can’t help wishing that Synder had gotten Joss Wheedon to write 3-dimensional female heroes, or Tarantino to write the dialog and make the fight scenes emotionally engaging, or Aronofsky to help him bring it to a stunning climax. There were so many great ingredients… but it failed at basic story telling.
