Corona | Coming Attractions

There is a common and incorrect perception held by the general public that video games cannot tell great stories. Jaw-dropping visuals, yes, and lots of action, sure. But a story that takes the player deeper into the world? Many people that don't play video games think that these stories can't reach great heights because they're too focused on the visuals or the action. In response I point to Silent Hill 2, Deux Ex, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the Ultima series, the Infocom word games from the early days of computer gaming, and I say to those doubters that they are wrong. There are games that push the art form to a truly interactive, creative level.

Unfortunately Sucker Punch is a movie that is like the worst of video games. This movie plays out like a button-masher devoid of depth past its surface level. To advance in these games you need to kill hundreds of faceless bad guys and then defeat the level boss, then rince, repeat, who cares. Always the graphics are great but the main character is a cypher, someone who's arms and legs you control but ultimately you don't care about. The game's NPCs (in the case of Sucker Punch, its' secondary characters) are better defined than the main character. Why? Because they're the ones who's dialogue you have to read between breaks in the action in these kinds of brainless games.

I'm laying on the video game analogy pretty thick because it fits Sucker Punch so well. This is a movie that has a slim premise -- a beautiful young woman only known as Baby Doll needs to escape from the mental asylum she's locked in or else she'll be lobotomized -- and typically that kind of bare bones synopsis works for those gorgeous to look at games. There's not a lot of care put into relating to the hero or heroine; let's leave it up to the visuals to make the story look cool, right?

I think Sucker Punch's problems began right at its start. Director/co-writer Zack Snyder chooses to introduce us to the tormented world of Baby Doll by telling it in slow motion and with a cover of the '80s Eurythmics song "Sweet Dreams". Let me tell you, dear reader, that the reason why so many music videos use slow motion with the song playing overtop the action is that, while it looks cool, it doesn't draw you that much in. This kind of story narrative is great to sell images and concepts but not characterization nor heavy drama. When the stepfather of Baby Doll advances on her little sister's bedroom, and his unspoken motivation is to commit some kind of sexual abuse, what's cool about slow motion and a remix is out the goddamn window. Your eyes are telling you to enjoy the moment but your head isn't.

Those opening moments, and Snyder's constant need to use slow motion to tell the story, go on for too long at the start of the picture. Snyder isn't building a foundation for the audience to emphasize with Baby Doll or to share the horror of her surroundings. By the time Sucker Punch's main story really gets going -- when Baby Doll imagines herself living the life of a newcomer to a brothel run by the hard-edged pimp/owner Blue (Oscar Issac) and then has to imagine secondary worlds beneath the brothel reality -- Snyder has lost us. It also doesn't help that the first words spoken by Emily Browning's Baby Doll ("Get off her, pig") don't come until about fifteen minutes into the movie.

Failing to build that strong emotional connection at the start of the film fatally damages Sucker Punch. It doesn't help either that there's no positive male characters in the movie save for an imaginary Scott Glenn that serves as wise man to Baby Doll and her crew of lost souls. All the men in Sucker Punch are the worst kind: abusers of young girls, pimps, beaters, criminals and thugs that fail to raise their voices to stop the violence. It seems that in Baby Doll's imaginary life of being a "dancer" (we know, Zack, that what you really mean is "whore", but this needs to be a PG-13 movie so there will none of that shown, just implied), the johns and handlers know that all the women in this place are locked up and can't even walk even outside but none of them tell the cops.

The movie exists to dress up pretty actresses in stockings, corsets and slutty Halloween costumes, then shoot automatic weapons or use martial arts to kill/destroy undead German soldiers, demonic samurai warriors, fire-breathing dragons and faceless robots. The women all take fantastic levels of super-violence, like being knocked back a hundred yards, without showing the slightest scratch or bruising, but somehow we're supposed to believe that their lives are in danger from their attackers. Again, this is why Sucker Punch plays out like a poorly written game; it doesn't need a story because it's just about leveling up and facing the next boss. Who cares if you die when you can just start from the last save point?

I don't want to spend too much time on why an abused woman would imagine herself empowered by wearing high heels and sexy costumes while fighting in battlefronts on many different worlds, but then again this is a movie that shows these characters still wearing dark eyeshadow and mascara while in bed. These are supposed to be the next generation of Sarah Connors or Ripleys?

When Sucker Punch's coda finally arrives it you can see what Snyder was aiming for, but by then you're just finishing the game up because you've sunk time into it. If the movie had cared as much about not alienating its audience from the start, the message that Snyder is telling us wouldn't feel as hollow as it does.

Aside from Browning's mannequin-like performance, the other women try to instill levels to their characters, Abbie Cornish's Sweetpea being the one that gets the best arc. As the girl's chief tormentor, Oscar Issac gives us every opportunity to loathe his character, and hopefully his performance will open doors for him. In their supporting roles Scott Glenn and Carla Gugino do their jobs but not as effectively as Jon Hamm. In his brief cameo appearance that comes at the end of the film, Hamm is able to deliver a few lines of dialogue that pack more weight than what Snyder's given us all throughout the movie. It's a shame that Snyder couldn't get more of that in the rest of his film.

Snyder, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures should be commended for making a movie that isn't a sequel, a remake or based on another property. Maybe they'll try something like this again, but next time make the characters and the story as interesting as the eye candy.

Review Score: 35 / 100