Sucker Punch

Desperate to see it. 300 and Watchmen are two of my favorite movies! Yeah, sure, the ads look a little weird…but I will not be deterred, I will see Sucker Punch and it will be amazing!

Alas. My enthusiasm and hype was not enough to create the movie I was hoping for.  I tried to ignore the bad reviews I was reading….the 23% on Rotten Tomatoes. No, I will make up my own mind!

Ten minutes in, I am absorbed. We are met with an incredible opening montage, done to a beautiful cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, performed by the film’s star, Emily Browning. It’s quite mesmerizing. The montage depicts the unfortunate beginnings of Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who kinda sorta accidently kills her sister, trying to threaten her abusive step father. It’s a brilliantly done opening. It’s simple, stylish and gets straight to the point. We understand the plot, the aesthetic of the film and our directors intent. Flawless opening.

Emily Browning looks fantastic as a blonde. I can’t get over it. I also can’t get over how damn skinny and fragile she looks. But I know that’s all part of the look. I understand the aesthetic. My brain, however, cannot stop thinking about what she must have had to eat (or more importantly, not eat) to look that tiny.

The moment we get into the real film, the beginning of the story is when everything goes down hill. Mainly because, you spend most of the time trying to figure out what’s actually going on.

Basically we have these beautiful girls, trapped in a mental asylum, escaping into worlds of fantasy to cope with the reality of their situation. The only problem is, you find yourself constantly wondering what is ACTUALLY going on in the real world. Of course, escaping into a fantasy can be a brilliant device, but as long as it’s mirroring a real world struggle and the audience understand the parallels. The main issue here is that the girls fantasize their escape, meanwhile I’m not sure how they are actually escaping in reality. We watch an entire fifteen minute sequence of a war fantasy where the girls battle (what look like orks from Lord of the Rings) to steal a key. But the entire time I would really just rather watch them actually steal the key. Because now I don’t know how they actually did it. A very flawed plan on the directors side.

Ultimately, I got a huge guilty pleasure watching Vanessa Hudgens escape her High School Musical persona, and she wasn’t bad at all. Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone are two of my favorite young actresses, so I was pretty happy with all the casting. Poor old Jon Hamm somehow ended up in this film for a full three minutes. What a waste! Were all his scenes just deleted?

Overall, such a disappointment. Obviously the film looks stunning. The aesthetic is quite mind-blowing. But who cares when the story makes no sense. I always come back to the same theories: you cannot save a bad script or a bad story. If the writing and the story isn’t there, it doesn’t matter what you do in post, it’s not gonna work.