Much better than I was expecting

Rating: 6/10 (6 September 2011)

I haven't been hugely impressed by Snyder in the past, and so I wasn't expecting much when I rented Sucker Punch. But this is definitely a movie that -- while not exactly Citizen Kane -- deserved better reviews on average than it got.
My theory about why that is: the movie was typically advertised as being built around a young girl's "escape" into her vivid imagination from her Dickensian horror of a life. Some reviewers, aside from apparently not having paid attention to the relationships between the different layers of the film's Russian doll plot, were understandably squicked by the notion that Snyder was portraying a girl "escaping in her imagination" into a brothel, with schoolgirl persona intact. (And thence into a series of apparently incoherent fight sequences introducing video game style by a seemingly random mentor character.) But Sucker Punch isn't about escape at all. The characters aren't "escaping" the Dickensian asylum of the film's opening for the "better" world of a brothel; rather, the brothel setting is a *literalization* of what's going on in the asylum. Likewise, the fight sequences aren't escape; they're a *literalization* of the life-and-death struggle over desire that surrounds the body, especially the female body. As a storytelling device, this makes sense and is actually quite clever. It's also, of course, an excuse for sexploitation filmmaking, and Snyder doesn't dance around that in the least... but I was pleasantly surprised to see there was a lot more going on than just the sexploitation.
There are also (in another nice surprise) a lot of really good performances here. The evil orderly / brothel-keeper is a very good villain, the nurse / madame character is ably-rendered, and the team of girls features acting talent ranging from the passably blank in the case of Babydoll (all that character needs) to the solid work that goes into Sweetpea and Rocket. Even some of the bit parts stand out more strikingly than that sort of thing normally does in Snyder's work.
Oddly, the biggest drawback is that the fight sequences themselves -- played out against hordes of faceless robotic opponents and pounding soundtracks -- turned out to be oddly weak. They're a good idea and provide some welcome relief from the unrelieved darkness of the film's other layers, and it's made clear that they're present to symbolize the very different kinds of conflict that are "really" happening, but in and of themselves they feel curiously empty despite all the frenetic action and explosions. Where real drama intrudes, as with Rocket's self-sacrifice, it does so because other layers of the plot have supplied it.
Still, not a bad film at all.