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.

Forget-Me-Not: A Review of 'Unknown'

‘We Germans are experts at forgetting,’ states Bruno Ganz’s private detective when he is approached by Liam Neeson’s befuddled Dr Martin Harris, a man whose first trip to Berlin began with lost luggage at the airport and – several taxi crashes, spousal shunnings and murder attempts later – has only got worse.  So what looked from the trailers like a re-heated version of Neeson’s unfortunate 2008 action splurge Taken is actually an amnesia-thriller in the Bourne mold.  Unknown, at the very least, knows from what cinematic cloth it is cut, but it is at its best when it dabbles in more unexpected material.

While Jason Bourne had no idea who he was and had to earn himself a moral compass – not to mention the approval of demur colleagues, matriarchal CIA directors, and grouchy Parisian mini-owners (women all) – in Unknown it is everyone around Dr Harris who seems to have suffered anamnesis adjustment, yet without any concurrent trauma.  His wife looks just as lovely as she did four days and one coma earlier, only now she claims not to know who our hero is, and is even clutching the arm of a doppleganger who, she assures, is actually Dr Martin Harris.

Given that his wife is played by walking shard of frosted ice January Jones, and the seemingly usurping paramour by an effectively similar Aiden Quinn (if only the budget, and his ego, would have stretched to casting Harrison Ford for this role, an actor many reviews have compared Neeson too here, then the face-offs between these two characters would have sparked with a flinty meta-intensity), it is briefly conceivable that Mrs. Harris just simply hasn’t noticed the change.  Yet that’s not it, and either she’s complicit in some nefarious plot, or the good Dr Harris (that is, the good Dr Harris) is losing his mind.

The introduction of Mr. Ganz only adds to the confusion (what is an actor like him doing in trash like this?), but when his character begins to talk of the bad old pre-unification days, and later uses Stasi informants to aid Harris’s search for existential security, we realize that he’s here because there really are meat on these bones.  Then there’s Diane Kruger’s cab driver, forced to work overtime in an Arab café and in no way willing to help out.  Another dead-end and more crumpled euro notes spent.  It is now when we might start to realize the depth of the film’s depiction of Berlin, a world city as much as London, but with a gaping absence that twenty years of glass and steel architecture and Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs cannot efface.  This is a city hostile towards embarrassment and insecurity even as it breeds ambiguity and chilly uncertainty: just ask Bourne, who had to overcome the chaos of rush hour Alexanderplatz to get his way, or Jodie Foster’s Kyle Pratt in Flightplan, whose grief-ridden plummet into possible insanity began at the same metro station Dr Harris spies someone following him.  Or does he?

Certainly, there is no getting away from the fact that there’s a hulking great car chase in the middle of the film, and even if it is an effective set-piece (and it is really rather good), it still bears witness to the stamp of producer Joel Silver and the need for blockbuster action cred.  Yet you’ll never catch Neeson with a gun in hand, and while pedestrians might be expendable, minor characters are not.  There is a subtly nuanced (and possibly unintended) naming and mourning of an early victim, while subsequent collateral damage is decried in a scene that would normally exist only between jump-cuts.

All of which makes the inevitable slide (and it is inevitable, and it is a slide) all the more regrettable, even if the mechanics of the revelation are handled somewhat smoother than those in the aforementioned Flightplan.  Even so, among the nonsense that riddles the final reel there are some nice details (I’ve never seen a Hitchcock blonde treated quite like that before), and the finale should not scrub the positive qualities of the rest of the film from your mind – even if it is precisely this logic which Unknown itself frustratingly advocates by way of conclusion.  It is a resourceful piece of entertainment, derivative and simple-minded on the surface, but while the twists may be under-developed, it is in the margins that the film is able to pleasantly surprise.  This alone makes it at the very least memorable.