Flawed but awesome

Rating: 7/10 (2 June 2011)

So, let's get something straight. I think Zack Snyder is a brilliant director. His incredibly stylistic vision he employs in his films is astounding and brutally incredible. Thus, anything I say in this review should not reflect poor opinions of Mr. Snyder, because he is a fantastic director. Despite anything that is wrong with his new film, Sucker Punch, Snyder still does an incredible job on the visuals and I would go as far as to call this film an aesthetic masterpiece. With that said, Sucker Punch is about a girl who is admitted to an insane asylum by her stepfather. The asylum, however, is just a facade for a whorehouse, and our protagonist finds herself amongst a lot of troubled young girls who want to escape from this evil place. In order to do so they go into the recesses of their minds to find the items they need in order to make their escape. It's trip. It's bizarre. It's rocky at points, but it is overall really cool.
The film opens with one of the coolest and most fantastically well put together opening sequences I've seen in a long time, something I've come to expect with Zack Snyder films. This sequence sets the bleak, yet highly stylized tone for the entire movie. After this initial setup the films story begins and we continue to get a feel for this moody and aesthetic atmosphere we are in. Then we have the first scene where Baby Doll, the protagonist, escapes into her mind for the first time and must fight three giant robot samurai warriors. And yes, it is as awesome as it sounds. This first true action scene made me realize just what I was in for and how visually incredible, if nothing else, this movie would be.
The movie continues to swap between real life and these, I guess you could technically call them, dream sequences. And each atmospheric action packed dream builds upon the previous, getting more and more intense. Snyder never lets up on the very specific, heavily stylized action, and it never gets old. I always commend a director when he delivers to me an adrenaline fueled action scene where I can actually tell whats going on. Snyder does this very successfully and rather than employing the shaky cam and loads of obnoxiously quick cuts Snyder plays out his action with lots of long shots and lots of slow-mo. After a little while I thought I would be terribly fed up with the slow-mo by the end of this film, but some how I wasn't. Like I said, everything that Snyder does with this camera and the amount of ingenious style he pumps this film with makes it all worth it, and it never gets old.
But of course when you have a movie with such strong visuals like these, there has to something wrong somewhere else. And there is. There really is. The story has a very cool concept behind it and can be considered very existential and psychologically deep, but the film doesn't go as far as I would have liked. Some things pan out weaker than expected and a lot could have been done to improve the flow of the story. The film does end well and it will definitely leave you thinking and wondering, what did I just experience? But the two biggest and most glaring issues this film has are its weak and placid characters, and its awful dialog. The dialog between characters isn't necessarily cheesy or corny, it was just so ridiculously one dimensional, with no kick, no air, no mood to it. It was completely flat, dull, and lifeless, just like the characters on screen who could have been a lot more interesting with the backgrounds some of them are given.
The acting is also pretty dreadful in this film. All the main actresses are, albeit gorgeous, very dull. This could definitely be because they had nothing to work with in terms of a script, but even the very few scenes that had some acting potential went nowhere for me and struck no emotional chord with me, no matter how hard it tried. For once I was actually happy that a film kept its dialog to a minimum because normally the dialog will be my favorite aspect of a film. But if Sucker Punch had spent any more time trying to develop these dead characters I wouldn't have ended up liking it as much, if at all. But thankfully this movie knows what it is capable of. It knows what it is here for and it knows what its audience wants. We want hot, scantily clad girls with giant guns and swords blowing stuff up for our own amusement. And we are given just that.
Sucker Punch is not at all a bad film. It is incredibly flawed, but there is just no way I could bring myself to dislike a film with such mind boggling visuals that had the adrenaline pumping through me at probably dangerous rates. I don't think I could hate this movie no matter how hard I try. It is just too awesome to dislike and it really does tell a neat story, you just kind of have to wade through a lot of dull characters and dreadful dialog to find it. Zack Snyder once again proves himself to be a modern day auteur, even if that is all Sucker Punch really has going for it.