Battlegrounds: A Review of 'Sucker Punch'

‘Whose subconscious are we going through, exactly?’ says the aptly named Ariadne at some point during last year’s crowd-pleaser Inception.  Dress this same character up in stockings, a short skirt and Kevlar, give her a samurai sword and a gun, and trot her in front a series of imaginative but depthless digital backdrops, and the answer is ‘Zack Snyder’s, of course!’ The Visionary Director™ behind Watchmen and 300 has only gone and made himself a fully-fledged Visionary Writer-Director™, crafting here a tale of psychological phantasmagoria and female empowerment.

Or so Sucker Punch would like to be.

Snyder’s films have only ever had the most passing of acquaintance with reality, and there is some considerable promise in the premise here, which turns his predilections for hyper-stylisation and combat display into potential strengths.  However, barely out of the starting gate, the film suffers a conceptual problem: protagonist Babydoll’s lapses into outrageous videogame combat scenarios serve to assist her in getting out of her mental asylum/brothel/prison-house, helping her discover an escape plan at the same time as transfixing onlookers with an intoxicating dance display.  Does retreat into simplistic fantasy serve empowerment and freedom?  Or is it a tactic the mind employs to escape unpleasant truths?  Freud would certainly think the latter.  Yet here we have a woman whose mental withdrawal during moments of heightened sexual objectification are celebrated.  Somewhere in Sucker Punch’s barely audible superego is an awareness of the falsity of this arithmetic concerning trauma and catatonia.

This is instead a two-hour surrender to the id.  But not even the female id – which would at least maybe offer something fresh – but rather the id of a fifteen-year old boy, whose excitement over hover trains, CGI samurai warriors, and zombie Nazis is matched only by his interest in Abbie Cornish’s décolletage.  Now, I may not be fifteen, but I’ll confess readily to finding all of those things appealing in their own way.  In which case, the frenetic fantasy sequences (yes, the whole film is a frenetic fantasy sequence, but you know what I mean) should be the moments the film flies in its own headless, deranged way.

Unfortunately, striking though these moments are, they lack even the vaguest thread of logic.  Wholesale adoption of mythical constructs for allegorical ends can work, and is perhaps the perfect approach to this kind of shallow spectacle, but Snyder takes things both too literally and not literally enough.  The same problem bedevilled Inception, appropriately enough – a paradoxical commitment to clunky literalism amongst visually incongruous dreamscapes.  It goes without saying that I think Tron: Legacy managed to chart a steadier course through these problematic waters, but so too the Matrix sequels, in their own way, did more interesting things in a similar gambit involving the recognition and pastiche of a narrative template, even if they did suck all the life out of it in the process.

‘If you don’t stand for something, you’re likely to fall for anything,’ says metaleptic mystic helper Keith Carradine Scott Glenn, seemingly not realising that neither he nor the film he is in stands for much of anything, although maybe he’s being mystically ironic.  Sucker Punch, after all, manages to equate losing one’s virginity with losing one’s mind, and as life-changing as your average lobotomy can be, the film fails to convince that it’s thought through, or even considered, the ideology it espouses, seemingly by accident.

But then no one is here for ideology, or even story.  That makes the tameness of the effects sequences all the more disappointing, rigorously sticking as they do each time to the same boilerplate, and even committing the cardinal sin of petering out: too late you realise the film is rounding itself up without any more battleground ballistics, and the feeling that you’ve just put your hand in an empty cookie jar when you were sure there were a couple left in there is hard to shake.  The cookies weren’t that great to begin with, but still.

In the recent run of psycho-subjectivity films like Shutter Island and Black Swan, Sucker Punch will be a minor entry, if remembered at all.  Which is a shame: Snyder came up with a genuinely fruitful idea here, one which could even be augmented by his particular hang-ups of high stockings, big guns, and slow motion sword-slicing.  Yet the film is never delirious enough to properly entertain, nor sensible enough to intrigue, which came as a genuine, dismaying surprise.  Consider that, and this, the worst kind of sucker punch.