Film review
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac
Release date 1 April 2011 (UK)

The wide-eyed Baby Doll (Browning) is sent to a grim mental institute by her abusive stepfather. Once there she befriends a group of other inmates: Sweet Pea (Cornish), Rocket (Malone), Amber (Chung) and Blondie (Hudgens). Together they gather the elements needed to escape – which involves battling various threats inside Baby Doll’s mind…

Sexy girls. Nazi zombies. An army of robots. Orcs. Dragons. Gigantic samurais…. If there’s one thing Sucker Punch was never going to be, it’s boring. And yet, strangely, it is. Zack Snyder, a filmmaker who has increasingly embraced hyper-stylisation since his raw and riveting Dawn of the Dead remake, stuffs every frame with style, spectacle and excess without pausing for breath. Eventually it stops feeling spectacular. In the form of a one-minute trailer it was awesome; in feature-length form it’s numbing.

Snyder (who also co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya) has said in interviews that his movie needed believable characters, rooted in real emotion, to make you care about the fantastical elements. He’s right – if only he’d followed through on that. Sucker Punch boasts a cast of talented, interesting young actresses who are clad in an array of striking, skimpy costumes (plus an underused Scott Glenn as a poor man’s Morpheus). Yet despite the cast’s best efforts, there’s little especially distinct, interesting or even sexy about any of these characters, and the fact that the big battles take place in Baby Doll’s imagination means there’s no sense of genuine danger.

But then Snyder isn’t really interested in the characters. He’s concerned with slo-mo explosions and slo-mo fighting and slo-mo leaping through the air. Even cigar ash can’t hit the floor without it crumbling in slow motion. The sequences set in the ‘real life’ mental institute are no less stylised or fantastical than the ones set in Baby Doll’s imagination – there seems little point going down the rabbit hole if it’s not significantly different to the world you left behind.

There’s also surprisingly little variation in the visuals. Sure, the Nazi-zombie sequence and the train-riding robot sequence look impressive enough taken on their own. But each of the levels has exactly the same desaturated look and the same cluttered fantasy landscape (the exception is Baby Doll’s Kill Bill-esque snowy showdown with phantom Samurais – perhaps the film’s high point).


The story, such as it is, is reminiscent of a junior school creative writing assignment: Baby Doll imagines herself and her pals fighting fantastical enemies across five different levels in her head. At one point Baby Doll writes down her grand plan on a blackboard: get hold of a map, fire, a knife, a key and a sacrifice. Surely the girls could have remembered such a simple plan, rather than running the risk of someone else discovering it?

Snyder treats all of this with deadly solemnity as if it’s a sequel to Vera Drake rather than a film about girls, guns and monsters. There are no jokes, and the whole thing – from the tone to the dialogue to the muddy visuals – has a relentlessly oppressive atmosphere. You could understand the serious tone in Snyder’s underrated Watchmen adaptation where it suited the deep and dark source material, but is there any reason why this straightforward story couldn’t have been fun? After all, it’s not like Sucker Punch actually has anything to say about institutional abuse, exploitation of women or mental illness (or anything else for that matter).

Even the music is mostly horrible. A random combo of grating remixes and grating covers, the tracks seem to be slapped onto the action regardless of whether it compliments what’s happening on screen or not. Emily Browning’s take on Sweet Dreams and Where is My Mind? aren’t even sung by her character, Moulin Rouge-style, which might have made some kind of sense.

No one’s denying there's some impressive art design and intriguing ideas buried within Sucker Punch. They’re just not given any kind of structure, coherence or heart. This is the first movie that Snyder has made that isn’t based on a comic, book or another film; you can’t help but wonder whether he needs that kind of framework, because Sucker Punch is an undisciplined mess. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 4/10
Some nice ideas are lost in the excess of style and absence of story. A big disappointment.