A disaster

Rating: 2/10 (27 March 2011)

A crime against the cinema. It's too bad. I honestly have enjoyed Zack Snyder's films in the past, besides that crappy owl movie he made last year. I'd classify them more as guilty pleasures than actual good movies, but I found them entertaining and neat to look at. Sucker Punch, though, combines all his worst traits and adds a script that he himself wrote (along with co-writer Steve Shibuya). His previous films were all adaptations, three of picture books and one a remake of a George A. Romero classic. He didn't have to think much himself to make those neat images. Sucker Punch demonstrates that he just doesn't have the ability to think of things himself. It's a movie that combines mental hospitals, burlesque shows, giant samurai warriors, half-mechanical zombie-Nazis, mech suits, orcs, dragons, killer robots, and atomic bombs, pretty much every cool thing one can think of.
And then one might guess that the problem is overkill. It isn't (well, that may be a smaller problem). The major problem is that there's not a single thing we haven't seen before here. Also, the plot is created in the worst possible way. The skeleton of it is pretty much identical to Inception. While this film had to have been conceived beforehand, so you can't blame it for ripping Nolan's film off, that's just one more strike against it. Emily Browning plays a girl who accidentally kills her sister while trying to defend her from her rampaging stepfather. She's sent to a mental hospital, where she hides behind two levels of reality. In the first level down, she's the new girl at a burlesque house/whorehouse. Snyder inserts a very video game-esque premise: she and her hooker friends (Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) are basically sex slaves, and they must find five objects to help them escape. Now, up to this point, the film is tolerable. It's not good, but it's watchable. The girls are very attractive, and the visuals are kind of old-fashioned and nice to look at.
But here comes the third level: whenever the girls are about to steal the next thing they need to escape, they all descend into a fantasy world which is about the most video game-like thing to ever appear in a movie. Well, kind of. There was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World last year. That one actually used video games in a clever, metaphorical way, and it did it with its tongue in its cheek. Snyder really thinks we want to watch people play video games on the big screen. The worst thing was, after I experienced the abject horrors of how boring this could possibly be the first time, I realized I was going to have to sit through this same thing four more times. Oh, these sequences are beyond awful, with these girls fighting through dozens of not-very-great-looking CGI Nazis, robots, orcs, whatever. This is the worst parts of every event movie of the past decade mashed into never-ending sequences. There's nothing logical about the existence of these sequences. The funny thing is, in that second level of reality, while these fantasy sequences are going on, Browning is dancing sexily in front of whomever the girls want to distract. I think Snyder had to have known that the premise that this girl is such a sexy dancer that anyone watching her would be so utterly distracted that the other girls could steal from them was laughably ridiculous. But, watching the movie, I'm not so sure he was smart enough to realize this. He's also not smart enough to realize that the audience this film was intended for would probably rather be watching the girl dance sexily than watch these hot girls play video games in front of us.
While these video game sequences are some of the worst cinema I've ever experienced, and about the worst bit of narrative, as well, Snyder isn't done completely screwing up. He completely miscalculates which characters the audience gives a damn about. He also doesn't make any sense of the connection between the first and second levels of reality (we'll thankfully forget about the third), and characters whom we met in the second level but not in the first aren't able to connect to the audience when we meet them there. The film ends with a character whom we don't know and don't give a crap about. And then I stand up and flee the theater, and it's all I can do not to start a riot in the lobby.