"Sucker Punch" Japanese Theatrical Poster

Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Zack Snyder, Steve Shibuya
Producer: Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder
Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn, Gerard Plunkett
Running Time: 110 min.

By HKFanatic

NOTE: This is a review of the Theatrical Cut.

“Sucker Punch” is the rare film that falls under the banner of ‘Asian Related’ not because the production team featured any Eastern talent like Yuen Woo-Ping choreographing “The Matrix” or cast members trained in the martial arts like Steven Seagal, but because it is so visually indebted to Asian culture that it wouldn’t exist otherwise. With “Sucker Punch,” Zack Snyder pilfers every Japanese animation motif and cliche to digitally vomit out a world of computer-colored excess. The movie drives home a lesson I had previously learned while watching the live-action adaptation of the “Blood: The Last Vampire” anime: just because a cute gal in a schoolgirl outfit looks cool dodging monsters in slow motion in an anime does not necessarily mean they’ll look cool doing it in real life. In fact, in live action it’ll probably come across as downright…silly.

To be fair, the premise for “Sucker Punch” isn’t bad. Emily Browning plays a young girl who is unfairly imprisoned in a mental asylum by her cruel stepfather. For reasons unknown to this viewer, while she’s there she pretends she exists in another reality in which she’s a prostitute at a high-scale brothel and cabaret theater. She befriends some of her fellow dancers and together they plot their escape through the use of Emily’s extremely vivid imagination. In fact, it’s during her dance routine that she’s sent into various realms ripped straight from your average comic book geek’s mind: a snowy Japanese temple, the trenches of a steampunk World War I, a Dungeons & Dragons-style castle, and a futuristic city plagued by killer robots.

Each world she visits is about 90% greenscreen and looks about as realistic as the landscape inside a snowglobe, despite a purported budget of 82 million dollars. The action sequences follow a repetitive pattern where actor Scott Glenn tells the girls what to do and then they go out and do it, fighting enemy forces in bloodless combat along the way. These battles lack the R-rated sense of impact and consequence one would associate with a Zack Synder film. Even if you thought the slow-motion combat in “300” was a thing of beauty, chances are you’ll be underwhelmed here. This is about as cutting-edge and violent as that late 90’s Garbage music video where Shirley Manson was riding around in a CG plane shooting her bandmates down. Which is appropriate, as the storytelling here feels more fit for MTV than the big screen.

The poor girls in the cast are forced to recite Zack Synder’s dialogue. Even the most experienced among them, like Jena Malone (“Donnie Darko”), struggle to make their roles seem more than the shallow caricatures they are. The rest of the gals, like Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung, just stand there looking pretty in lingerie or, when that fails, start crying. Sure, the girls look like they were trained to hold automatic weapons in military fashion during the action scenes but for Zack Synder to try and claim that “Sucker Punch” is some kind of feminist statement is beyond ridiculous. Everything about the film conforms to sexist stereotypes. It’s as though Synder sat and brainstormed about how he could get your 16 year-old kid brother to put down his Mountain Dew Big Gulp and Xbox 360 controller long enough to head to the local multiplex, and decided the best way was to add the Pussycat Dolls to the average video game equation.

The director’s cut, which I haven’t seen, runs 18 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. I imagine that some of the problems I mentioned, like tame and bloodless action, could be remedied in a longer, unrated version. At the same time, many of the film’s other flaws – weak dialogue, weak performances, its repetitive structure – probably aren’t going to change with a director’s cut. Considering how much “Sucker Punch” fails at basic storytelling principles and at inciting an emotional response (or even any sense of awe or excitement) in the audience, I think Superman fans have every right to be worried about Zack Synder’s upcoming Superman film “Man of Steel.” There’s no doubt that Synder will bring the action – I imagine that’s why Warner Brothers hired him – but after the tepid box office results of “Sucker Punch,” the studio has to be wondering if they bet on the wrong horse.

Synder’s films have always been “pretty” on a purely visual level, but by fully embracing a CG aesthetic based off a homogenized notion of video game cutscenes and Japanese cartoons he’s created a film so resoundingly fake and empty that the only thing left to appreciate is Emily Browning’s bee-stung lips.

HKFanatic’s Rating: 3/10