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.

The Ten Commandments of 'Faster'

Thou shalt privilege style over content.

Thou shalt shoot first, and never think to ask questions.

Thou shalt herald the return of Dwayne Johnson to where he doth belong.

Thou shalt feature the best work Billy Bob Thornton’s done for years.

Thou shalt condemn Carla Gugino to being an expository third wheel.

Thou shalt devote undue time to off-kilter yet oddly sober sub-plots.

Thou shalt not, despite advertising strongly suggesting the contrary, feature a car chase worth mentioning.

Thou shalt make unto thee a graven image of all generic precursors.

Thou shalt covet religious solemnity.

Thou shalt reap congenial entertainment from unpromising material.

'Hawaii Five-0' Checklist and Drinking Game

Drinking takes away the pain.

Obligatory surfing scene [shot of vodka]

Women in bikinis on a beach [shot of dark rum]

Alex O'Loughlin's torso displayed unnecessarily [shot of white rum]

A comment is made about the unnecessary displaying of Alex O'Loughlin's torso [shot of whisky]

Scott Caan says something irreverent in an irritable way (possibly about Alex O'Loughlin's torso) [shot of tequila]

Daniel Dae Kim says 'bro' [shot of gin]

Touchscreen computer technology used for simple task [shot of sambuca]

Helicopter shots used for no discernible reason [pint of lager (downed)]

Our protagonists have homoerotic argument while driving [pint of Guinness (downed)]

The Five-0 squad investigate the murder of a close friend/mentor/family member [yard of ale]

Product Placement [one Jägerbomb per example of any of the following]

• Chevrolet

• Hawaii Airlines

• Hawaii Tourist Board

• Bing

You forget that the show isn't called CSI: Honolulu [the full “ginning”]

The suspicion that it will soon be cancelled becomes impossible to ignore [strong cup of coffee]

Book 'em, Danno [cyanide pill]

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.

22 Things I Learned From 'Drive Angry 3D'

1. Satanic cults have a high rate of attrition.

2. Hard asses take their coffee black, with lots of sugar.

3. No one caresses a handbrake like Amber Heard.

4. The US mid-west has been abandoned by all rational people and colonised by laconic, diner-visiting demons (see also Legion, which I can only assume is better, if only because it’s four minutes shorter).

5. Calling a slightly overweight person “fat” is a funny enough joke to sustain five minutes of screen time.

6. Real men ask for a shotgun the same way the rest of us order an espresso.

7. The sheet at the back of the garage always conceals an immaculate classic American car.

8. Hell has a poorly protected armoury (which is running low on stock – three bullets?!), and a disintegrating drawbridge of some kind.  No, really.

9. Louisiana police captains have a very relaxed dress code (and poor taste in t-shirts).

10. There’s always an old friend that lives nearby.

11. There’s always a flirty waitress (or several).

12. Never trust the FBI.

13. Women don’t bruise.

14. Nicolas Cage seems to be interested in little else these days than a self-directed retroactive career assassination.

15. David Morse has given up on life, or at the very least on cinema. (You’re not the only one, David, you’re not the only one).

16. If this film was aiming for the vibe of an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty then it failed, and only succeeded in making me wish it were as brief and succinct as an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty.

17. That this was written, edited, and directed by the same person indicates that that person should seek help.

18. A perverse, slightly intriguing performance by William Fichtner as a diabolical bounty hunter can look like a stunning exercise of comic genius when surrounded by utter, utter dreck.

19. Drive Angry 3D.  The three Ds are driving, demons, and despondency.

20. When even Nicolas Cage looks bored, you know you’re close to witnessing the very atomic structure of boredom.

21. Grindhouse this ain’t.  Shucks, this wasn’t even Machete.

22. Hell is another Nicolas Cage film.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me: A Review of ‘Black Swan’

Where to begin?  Director Darren Aronofsky chooses to begin in a dream, his ballet dancer protagonist illuminated against the darkness by the white shaft of a spotlight.  We may well stay in this dream for the duration, so ethereal and otherworldly is Black Swan.  Where his previous film The Wrestler made a big noise about its lack of big noises and real-world, follow-shot aesthetic, here Aronofsky marries similar devices of verisimilitude to the splintered hallucinoscapes of Requiem For a Dream and The Fountain.  Such catachrestic combinations makes for something of an Aronofsky ur-experience, but Black Swan is such an accomplished feat of filmmaking that every grace note and every plunge, every glide and every misstep, are entirely intended.
 

Surely there is no need to rehearse the plot here, so much hype has the film received on ‘the festival circuit’ – suffice to say it concerns the casting, rehearsals, and performance of a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and the intense psychological pressure placed on lead dancer Nina Sayers.  As played by Natalie Portman, Nina is a quivering and epicene virgin predestined to become an emotional wreck in a matter of years – indeed, the same thing seems to have happened to her mother, whom actress Barbara Hershey does a fine job of saving from the pigeonhole of thankless grotesque.
 

There is no mention of a father figure, absent or otherwise, which is indicative of Black Swan’s attitude towards gender roles.  Some may find its sexual politics dubious, but as an effort to create a dramatic scenario between competitive women not dependent on male attention it is to be commended.  But wait!, you may cry, what of the insidious director of the ballet Thomas (Vincent Cassel) and the importance his approval plays in the story?  This is true, but it is also skin-deep, and to an extent the film dramatises the attempt of women to forge a space for themselves which does not have to suffer phallic intrusion.  The strange final gesture of Winona Ryder’s over-the-hill (at 28!) dancer Beth is the most explicit condemnation of such violation, while those familiar with Swan Lake itself will note the far from insignificant omission at the end of the production-within-a-film, itself suggesting a measure of success for Nina and her sex even in a moment of tragedy.
 

This focus on the way women are looked at called to mind the recent Amer, an ode to Dario Argento currently playing at London’s ICA, which also deployed some schlock horror to make its point (although in Amer’s case I could have done with much more).  Black Swan itself goes some pretty dark places (to put it mildly), and there is certainly something trashy about some of the shock-cuts and accompanying thunderous music stings.  Yet once again these are deployed in something of a sincere attempt to enter a feminine subjective viewpoint – it should be noted the occasionally creepy Thomas is never the subject of horror (and a throwaway backstage moment during the final performance from the actor playing the villain Rothbart is telling), but rather the many women who surround Nina provide the jolts, themselves all possibly projections of Nina’s splintered Freudian subconscious.

Issues of psychological breakdown under intense pressure and identity slippage?  Did somebody mention American Psycho?  Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel on yuppie malaise makes a wonderful companion piece to Black Swan, and rather than the differences between the films accentuating the genders of the protagonists, a comparison if anything reveals the precariousness of Patrick Bateman’s masculine authority and draws out the common ground between the ballet dancer and the investment banker.  Narcissism, insecurity and submerged violent urges are not to be relegated to one sex or another, but are common features of the contemporary human condition.  For New Yorkers, at any rate.

The allegorical structure of the film of course demands that the production be more than mere background, and certainly Tchaikovsky’s music is just as integral to the experience of Black Swan as is the narrative of the ballet.  What further intrigues, though, is the extent to which the film may be read as a depiction of the creative process: the stress, tensions, and rewards of the long gestation of a piece of great art, a process at once both self-revelatory and self-destructive.  I would, perhaps controversially, or at the very least bizarrely, also suggest an affinity between this and Tron: Legacy, both grappling with the burden of creation, and ultimately coming to a similar conclusion of drastic self-effacement (although prompted by somewhat different motives).  Even Patrick Bateman is himself something of an artist – check out his daily planner – and his “no catharsis” moment in the final scene is itself a catharsis, as he is subsumed to the indistinct mass of designer suits and tanned skin from which he never really departed.  (The camera itself even has a habit of disappearing in Black Swan during the many fleeting moments one should be able to see it reflected in the myriad of mirrors on display.)

This is all to somehow avoid mentioning the remarkable synthesis of sound design, staging, and special effects in the film.  There is something unforgettable – yet above all accurate – about the chiaroscuro effects of the New York subway (and this film is so very, very good on New York) overlain with the creeping sounds of flapping wings.  The minutiae of ballet dancing preparation is explained with all the care of a documentary (shoe preparation, sessions with a physiotherapist – apparently a real event captured by Aronofsky after Portman injured herself on set), although one hopes the rehearsal spaces at Lincoln Centre don’t much resemble the charcoal-shaded carcereal tombs created by a remarkably on-point production design team.

So where do we end?  Where we began of course – on the stage.  That hot spotlight is well earned, as Black Swan is a remarkable filmmaking achievement which may have a heightened awareness of its own artifice, but more than make a virtue of that, makes it the whole point.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Next Three Days'

1. Having identified the prime suspect of a murder minutes after the crime has taken place, the police will sleep on it and arrest the suspect the following morning.

2. Prison doctors exhibit undue commitment to their felonious patients, and sound as though they were educated at Oxford.

3. Accepting a lift across state lines from a kindly stranger makes you an accessory after the fact.

4. You can break into a van using a tennis ball.

5. You can pick a lock using a filed down key.

6. Suicide attempts should under no circumstances be taken seriously.

7. Don’t trust a sleazy, drug-dealer-recommended low-life to make you a fake passport.

8. Do trust a motorcycle riding deaf stranger to make you a fake passport.

9. Russell Crowe ate all the pies.

10. Male detectives are intense, psychic, and insanely committed to their jobs.

11. Female detectives bitch a lot.

12. It takes heavily built criminal lackeys, armed with shotguns, an age to kick (not shoot, apparently) open a locked wooden door.  Only faced with the threat of imminent immolation is the required effort put in.

13. You don’t need psychological depth when you have criminal instruction videos.

14. Given the choice between a possibly sociopathic Elizabeth Banks and a kindly, flirty, willing-to-babysit Olivia Wilde, some men would choose the former.  Fools.

15. There’s always a group of sports fans to blend in with.

16. The professor always delivers a lecture which is spookily appropriate to his own situation (here, on Don Quixote and escapism).

17. Writer-Director Paul Haggis cannot write a scene, or frame a shot to save his life.

18. The centre of every American city can be locked down within fifteen minutes.

19. The murder of drug dealers will be investigated with all the manpower and forensics that the Pittsburgh police department can muster.

20. The murder of a well-paid company executive will not.

21. Sponsored items required for a jailbreak include, but are not limited to, an iPhone, a satnav, a North Face coat, a digital camera (with face recognition), and a Prius.  Access to youtube, google and amazon are also musts.

22. Willing suspension of disbelief is fine.  Three days worth of unbelievable, badly plotted, poorly judged nonsense is not.