I had a mate who was very excited to see this, so he dragged me and another friend along to watch this. While I’m much more excited for Rio and Fast Five, I was kind of ambivalent towards SP, so I knew nothing beyond what they showed in the trailer.
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. The opening ten minutes, I think, is absolutely breathtaking. It is almost like a short film in itself, and it is one of the most emotional openings I’ve seen since Up - although not as beautiful or as poetic, nor did it bring me to tears, it is still very heartwrenching and would make a great music video or something. Anyway, we get to the mental asylum, and things start to get a little boring while we are introduced to the various characters, who are slightly one-dimensional and not as fully-fleshed as I would like them to be.
Then we get to Emily’s character’s first action sequence and things start to get interesting. Without giving too much away, she and her “traveling companions” have to break out of the asylum by battling through various dreamscapes and alternate fantasy worlds. It’s a bit like Toy Story 3 meets Inception meets Shutter Island, if I were to put in a blunt way, but Zack is much more imaginative than that (or at least, his scriptwriters and set designers are) and he has crafted his own visual masterpiece.
Each “dream world” is wonderfully detailed and visually exhilarating, and as many reviewers have mentioned, resembles a video game. I had a very strong urge to play a shoot-em-up like Counterstrike after a few of the sequences, of which there’s about four/five in the movie.
Also, the villains are suprisingly more well-developed than the heroes. Oscar Isaac is the deliciously cruel master of the asylum/bordello/dream worlds, and the climax shocked me when he crosses the “moral event horizon”. Carla Gugino is also empathetic as the therapist/dance instructor who acts as a mother figure and looks out for the girls. And Scott Glenn is hilarious as the nameless “Wise Man” who dispenses with revelatory aphorisms such as “Don’t ever write a check with your mouth that you can’t cash with your *ss.” There was one dream world which had this dragon, and after they [spoil]killed its baby, there was this shot where you see the mother dragon bend down in anguish and nudge her offspring’s lifeless corpse[/spoil]. That was a very touching moment, an unexpected one to the standard “dragon goes on a rampage for no apparent reason”.
Unfortunately, the visual spectacle doesn’t make for the rather meaningless narrative. I really, really disliked the story. It is very dark, and while I like “realistic” storylines that begin with conflict, like Quantum of Solace, Rango, M:I III, or The Fugitive, Emily’s constant “fighting against the odds” begins to get a bit wearing by the third dream sequence. That is another problem I had with the story, instead of the conventional three-act structure with a climax at the end, SP has countless of peaks and valleys with numerous climaxes. It would’ve worked well if the action sequences were compiled as a series of short films like The Animatrix or Halo Legends, but when done as a feature film, it gets exhausting and repetitive.
Another problem I had with the story was that the entire plot is a “sucker punch”. You’re rooting for Emily’s character but somewhere towards the end, they pull the rug from under you. Some may like the “twist”, but I found it to be rather depressing and anticlimatic. Also, don’t expect the characters who you think are going to die, to die. The entire movie is like a middle finger to scriptwriting convention. Maybe that was the point. But as the title implies, it won’t be pleasant. I have to say, though, I admire Zack’s guts for his unconventional storytelling.
One more thing. Sucker Punch feels like an adult movie at times with the mature themes and curse words and violence, but it feels as if it’s holding back from being a full-on R movie of blood-spilling Kill Bill-style. In a way, it feels like Live Free or Die Hard (which had a censored version of Bruce’s immortal line) or Legend of the Guardians (which had sparks instead of owl blood) or The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (which had a scene where Caspian stabs someone and pulls the sword out with no blood on it, that got several people in my audience laughing). You have the girls all skimpily-dressed up in sailor-costumes and battling these epic monsters, and you don’t see a drop of blood, or a peek at their Sula nebouxii. At the moment that Isaac’s character crosses the point of no return twice in the dressing room, the camera cuts away from his act both times. Unlike LOTG, I had the impression that Zack was gonna let loose on SP, so I was disappointed to say that he, for want of a better word, “held back on his punches”.
In the end, it is still a very pretty film to look at. I loved the steampunk set designs, the imaginative settings, the acting of the characters (I didn’t know Vanessa Hudgens could cry so convincingly!) and any scenes which had Scott Glenn in it. I really disliked the gothic costumes (which I think is just for male eye-candy and is extremely gratuitous), the constant slow-mo-speed-up ramping taken to head-spinning, nausea-inducing degrees, and the rather fatalistic outcome, which runs contrary to the opening’s theme of self-empowerment and redemption.
I wanted to be floored by this movie, but instead I got a suffocating full-nelson.
Rating: 6/10 Knockouts