Movie Review: Sucker Punch

If anybody has seen Zack Snyder speak publicly then they will know that he's not great with words. When trying to describe anything from motivation to descriptions, he gets tangled up very easily and starts to get incoherent. It's a wonder that he can describe what he wants as a director to his staff. His visuals are unquestioningly ambitious and he has a wonderful eye for the action sequence and montage. From his debut with Dawn of the Dead he has established himself as a auteur to watch. Sucker Punch is the first movie he's directed based off his own original material and, well...he should stick to directing.

I hate to sound flippant but even if you thought Snyder was an all-visual-no-emotions kind of director you have to give him credit for trying. In Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen he had characters that had motivations and feelings, even if they got in the way of all his slow-mo/fast-mo action pieces. He has no such characters to speak of in Sucker Punch. I honestly couldn't keep some of them straight most of the time. The movie deals with girls in a mental institution who are forced to dance/whore around and are trying to escape. They enter a sort of dreamscape action mode whenever they need to find a piece of the puzzle needed to escape the compound and this is cool for a bit before getting very confusing. I can't deny that a group of scantily-clad ladies firing guns and swinging swords isn't fun to watch but at some point I just wanted them to cut the act, swipe the item and run away already.

My girlfriend put it best when the movie was over. "I think Zack Snyder wants to empower women, he just doesn't know how to go about it." Snyder could definitely stand to have a conversation or two with Joss Whedon about how not to objectify women while having them stand up for themselves. The characters in Sucker Punch do amazing things and perform incredible feats but they're unable to do so without getting tarted up enough to put most anime characters to shame. It's not necessary but it's cool, and that seems to be the mantra Snyder had while working on the script.

Sucker Punch feels like a clever way to work nuggets of ideas into one movie. Having a cool idea for a train heist against robot soldiers but not having more than that is certainly an issue. Snyder has many scenes such as this (involving dragons, orc-like hordes, zombie germans, and more) but instead of coming up with 4 great movies to put these scenes in, he's seen to it that they should all go into one movie. Spinning these loose threads together with some truly terrible dialogue and half-baked characters makes the whole endeavor feel longer than it is. It's almost a backhanded compliment to say that the best parts of Sucker Punch are the moments when nobody is talking and the long-form music videos that make up the action scenes. If you're cool with turning your brain off before entering the theater (lest it turn to mush when you exit) then you'll probably have a blast. I can't assume that it sounds like a fun time for anyone other than Snyder though.