A Collection of Music Videos

Rating: 4/10 (21 January 2012)

Before I start this review I want to say I am a fan of Zack Snyder's directional style and I find that Dawn of the Dead a great example of how to do a remake and 300 to be a really entertaining action film. But sadly Sucker Punch found to be a flaw work.
"Babydoll" (Emily Browning) is a young woman who after her mother dies is sent to a Mental Hospital when she accidentally kills her sister when trying to defence her from their step-father (Gerard Plunkett). In the hospital Babydoll is scheduled to have a lobotomy in five days. She has to escape before them. Blue (Oscar Isaac) secretly runs the hospital as a brothel with the girls performing erotic dances for high playing clinics. Babydoll befriends the girls, Rocket (Jena Malone), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) to get the five items they need to escape and as Babydoll dances she escapes into a world of fantasy.
Snyder has a great visual style and he deserves to be an in demand director. He is one of the best action directors around, he sticks to his guns and I am still looking for to see what he does with The Man of Steel. There are some impressive action sequences in the Sucker Punch, the highlights being the sequence against the German World War One Zombies and against the mechanic robots. They are what Snyder does best, close action scenes, great camera movements and slow motion as well brutal (or as brutal as they can be for 12/PG-13 film) scenes with steam power zombies getting shot and stabbed. But it felt like Snyder was holding back and that Sucker Punch should have been 15/R rated film, with blood, gore and full on violence. Some elements like the sequence in the castle felt like it was borrowing from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings because the orcs looked the same. As well because the action sequences take place in the mind of Babydoll so they do not have any real impact on actual events of the film and music plays throughout them, making them seems more like music videos then being part of the film. Sucker Punch starts with a montage which is basically a music video and then there was a montage of Babydoll's life is again more like a music video. Babydoll hardly speaks for the first 20 minutes of the film.
The acting throughout Sucker Punch is decent enough. I generally like Browning and I hope she has a long career but her character was at times little too meek and quiet. Isaac did have a real sinister edge to his character and he was a scary figure to the girls. But Carla Gugino spoke in an really exaggerated Russian accent that did get a bit annoying.
As a film Sucker Punch does have some of the worst examples of fanboy/gaming culture. The first fantasy sequence sees Babydoll fighting three big samurai monsters and she is dressed throughout in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit. Some critics have complained that Sucker Punch is a sexist, leering at women in sexualised outfits whilst others say it that is empowering because they wore their outfits with authority and there is of course a feminist theory that woman should take back these outfits and woman should embrace these sexuality. I personally do not think it meant to be sexist but it does play into a fanboy fantasy that they want a woman to be a kick-ass hero but wants them to be hot whilst they do it.
Sucker Punch is a disappointment for Snyder fans. It is just a film that is a load of good imagines but not substance behind them.