Sucker Punch

In some senses, you've got to hand it to Zack Snyder. Whatever else you say about him, this is a man who can Get Stuff Done. With 300 and Watchmen, he delivered what many at the time believed impossible - comic book adaptations which were faithful to the source, and which neither the fans nor the mainstream thought were totally horrible. Whether they showed much art or creativity is debatable, but he does have something of a knack for reading something, liking it, and making a film that looks just like it. So, with Sucker Punch, we're in uncharted territory. Since it's entirely his creation, written and directed by him, Sucker Punch might be a faithful reproduction of the inside of Zack Snyder's head.

And may heaven help him if it is.

The Plot:
A wicked stepfather has (probably) murdered the mother of two girls, and subsequently finds that they inherit all; there's a bit of a tussle which reveal him as an evil fat bastard rapist, and we end up with the younger daughter dead, him injured, and the older daughter being accused of having gone mad, and incarcerated in a mental asylum from the 1950s. Once there, the evil stepfather bribes an orderley to have her lobotomised. The doctor who will perform the procedure arrives in five days. She has that long to escape. At this point it should be noted that all the inmates are women, all the orderleys are men, and there's a woman psychologist working with the girls.

And then it goes a bit weird, as it seems that she genuinely has gone mad, and the perspective of the whole film shifts and they're no longer inmates in an asylum, they're exotic dancers/hookers in a bordello, and our protagonist is the new girl, who's to be handed over to a high-roller who likes virgins in five days. At this point we learn her name, and the names of four other girls at the asylum/bordello. They are "Baby Doll", "Sweet Pea", "Rocket", "Blondie" (not blonde) and "Amber". Already, it's beginning to look that this delusional fantasy-scape that Baby Doll is trapped in is very much out of a man's head, rather than any plausible female character's.

Anyway, the girls dance for clients, being taught to dance by a bordello madam who resembles the psychologist, and when Baby Doll dances, she goes into one of a series of linked fantasy scapes in which she is now a warrior fighting in one of a series of slightly linked scenarios. Opponents include 10 ft tall samurai golems, clockwork steam-powered WWI German zombies, orcs, dragons, robot gunmen, and so forth. Again, these are all looking like male fantasies to me.

Throughout all this, there is an escape plan hatching, in a slightly Inceptionish way; in her war fantasies, she sort of works out what she needs to assemble to escape, and in the bordello fantasy she assembles these items, all the while evading the orderley/bordello owning gangster.

Essentially, what this film looks like is what would happen if you gave a geek going through puberty some mescaline, transcribed his babblings, then filmed it, stitching it together into a narrative structure that attempts to explain why it's otherwise totally incoherent. As a film, it succeeds in only two areas. First, when we're having our fantasy war sequences, for all that it's utter nonsense, and actually admitted by the plot to be just a hallucination, it all looks pretty spectacular. Zack Snyder knows how to make an action sequence look pretty damned epic, and all this is pretty much 300 without the taste and restraint. So, on the pure eyecandy "women in lingerie with guns shooting steampunk zombies" front, Great Success. Second, although the film pays a debt to a number of "multi layer reality" films, like Inception, eXistenZ, and the majority of the back catalogue of Terry Gilliam, there is a sense of originality here - nobody else is doing stuff remotely like this, even if it is pretty debatable whether anyone at all should be.

Downsides - well, frankly, the whole asylum/bordello thing is pretty queasy exploitation stuff, along the theme of "Fat ugly men abuse beautiful young girls who are forced to dance for their amusement." It's the kind of thing that might, maybe, in the hands of a director and cast with sufficient talent, transcend the "ick" factor, and say something interesting. In the hands of Zack Snyder, I'm afraid it comes off looking rather cheap and tawdry, with nobody coming out of it looking particularly unsullied.

I've long held the opinion that it's perfectly fine for a film to be stupid, so long as it's fun, but for far too much of this film, it just isn't. The good fun bits that are fun do not outweigh the bad bits that aren't. I'm looking forward to Zack Snyder's version of Superman, but he should never, ever, be allowed to write a script ever again.