OK, I do know why: Zack Snyder has only really impressed me once, and that was way back on his first film, Dawn of the Dead, one of the better horror remakes in recent years (hint: the best remakes are the ones that take the general outline of the original and fashion a brand new story around it). Watchmen was also well done but stuck so close to the comic book that I have a hard time singling Snyder himself out as worthy of commendation.
What I was expecting out of Sucker Punch was something akin to the stylized, one off appeal of 300, a movie I enjoyed looking at (as opposed to watching) once but have never felt the urge to revisit again. Instead, Sucker Punch is the absolute ultimate in fanboy pandering, which could be a good or bad thing depending on whether you are, in fact, a fanboy or just one of the disgruntled wallflowers that wish the geek brigade would use their newfound power within the zeitgeist to demand better quality, instead of just trading in the intellectualism that made them geeks in the first place for more explosions and PG-13 T&A.
Clearly I am in the bitter, latter category. And yet, I've acknowledged that I'm occasionally down for a mindless action flick, as long as it delivers on some level (ditto for horror and comedy; I'm willing to forgive terrible plotting and characterization as long as they come through on the kills and jokes, respectively). The problem with Sucker Punch is that, while it is indeed mindless, it doesn't really deliver on the action.
First of all, it's bad enough that the action sequences are rendered in a way where they look like cut scenes from a video game, but if these scenes were indeed intended to resemble a video game they would have to be one in which a cheat code had been entered, because none of the virtual heroines in this film are ever under any danger at all until the end of the movie, where the need for resolution absolutely requires the random sacrifice of several of the girls just to lend the movie some semblance of weight, right in time for the scheduled denouement. In the meantime, Baby Doll and friends waltz through one melee after another without so much as a scratch... whatever happened to the old days where action heroes were required to actually, you know, take a punch every now and then? Which makes it all the more disingenuous when the heroes one by one are forced to throw themselves under the bus to save the others.
Mind you, these aren't earned sacrifices... the girls do not meet their demise because the challenges have gotten progressively harder, but only because it's getting time to wrap the movie up and there are a few half assed themes that could use a little bloodshed in order to put them over. But the ease with which the villain dispatches our lovely lasses completely undermines any tension or accomplishment the previous ass kicking scenes might have built up, and indeed, the final act has that Stephen King vibe where the writer is so confident that he's reeled you in that he just throws together a nonsensical climax because, hey, if you're still around at this point you'll obviously buy anything.
But what makes this film the ultimate in fanboy pandering is not the fact that it's built entirely around eye candy - both of the (PG-13) T&A variety as well as the CGI kind - but the fact that Snyder, who co-wrote the screenplay and is entirely to blame for this (hopefully career-killing) abomination, throws in several themes that are blatantly stolen from recent blockbusters and uses them to add gravitas to a movie that doesn't remotely deserve it.
First off, there's the female abuse angle, already exploited ad nauseum in the Swedish Millenium trilogy, which has gotten a substantial amount of press stateside and is coming soon to a remake near you... so I don't believe for a minute that Snyder stumbled across this angle all by himself, especially considering how clumsily it's worked into the central plot device.
Early on, the routinely molested Baby Doll is framed for the murder of her little sister and sent off to an asylum to be lobotomized. Fortunately, deus ex machina rears its convenient head and they have to wait for the lobotomist to arrive, which gives Baby Doll ample time to fantasize that she and her similarly fetching fellow patients are not aslyum-bound at all, but are actually dancers in a fairly chaste brothel... because when sexually abused young women seek to empower themselves through fantasy, obviously working in a whorehouse is the healthiest thing to daydream about. But, again, this movie is PG-13 so the sexual empowerment angle is not really explored in the manner that the Millenium trilogy was able to get away with.
These fantasies don't end there, however. Baby Doll the virtual exotic dancer has her own fantasy life going on within this alternate reality, and visualizes her dance routines as ass kicking sequences against a series of random villains, this all taking place in ad hoc CGI settings which are clearly meant to evoke the levels of video games. I guess the point here is that we're supposed to get so wrapped up in the smash cut segues between these scenes that we're intended to overlook the fact that Snyder has totally cribbed the whole nested reality thing from films like Inception and Source Code, and does so in a way that never comes anywhere close to paying off... it just seems like Snyder attempted to shoehorn every recent trend in sci-fi action movies into his little pet project. There's really no particular reason for the second layer - the brothel/dance studio - when the fantasy action sequences could have been triggered directly from the asylum (ie. during shock treatment, dream sequences... whatever).
Oh yes, and you can't have a dead horse parade of played out tropes without incorporating steampunk in there somewhere, can you? Well, Snyder does us one better: how about steampunk zombies? That's right, these zombies - reanimated WWI German soldiers - are not only undead soldiers with retro-futuristic outfits and weaponry, but they are literally made out of steam, hot air venting forth whenever any of them are shot or stabbed.
For the love of Christ.
Again, I realize that this is all stylized and is not meant to be remotely realistic, but the genre hopping is so blatantly trendy that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You want to enjoy it for what it is, but on some level you're endorsing art by committee if you allow yourself to get too swept up in it. The manipulation is so chest thumping and in your face that it's impossible to suspend your disbelief without feeling like a damn fool in the process.
The finale is where Snyder's pretense really sends things irrecoverably over the edge. It's hard to get specific here without getting into spoiler territory, but suffice to say Snyder attempts to wrap up his trainwreck of a plot in predictably disastrous ways, most notably in the lobotomy scene, which not only fails to answer any questions but raises quite a few new ones... and not the philosophical kind (a la Inception, which Snyder is clearly patterning his nested reality after) but rather the "wtf were they thinking?" variety.
Snyder's no dummy; he realizes that if he strings together enough fanboy tropes he doesn't really have to make any sense: the fanboys themselves will rationalize away all the plot holes in order to justify all the juvenile itches that Sucker Punch scratches. You've got barely legal chicks parading around in school girl uniforms, all the while effortlessly slaying end level bosses with their skirts fluttering provocatively in the breeze... you've got a bottomless parade of 4chan-era pop culture artifacts marching across the screen... you have an insane plot which could have easily been more sensible but instead dares you not to roll your eyes at it... basically what you have is a deliberate attempt to create a big budget cult movie, one like Army of Darkness or Dead Alive where you're supposed to like it precisely because it is so cheesy.
But unlike those other cheesy films, Sucker Punch not only rips off too many contemporary, superior movies without doing anything different with the material, but it forgets to actually be any fun while doing so. With any luck, Sucker Punch's DVD release will introduce the movie to a wide enough audience that there will be reverberating waves of backlash from the non-geeks, those old school action fans that still demand something more than just knowing references and increasingly fake CGI. With any luck, this movie will be the geek's Waterloo.
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