I have not read any of the reviews of Sucker Punch, but I can only imagine that many of them remark on the lobotomy and incorporate that in some way into the review as a clever zing, just as I am doing now. It is a cheap and easy thing to do, but the truth is that nothing connected with this film can ever be called clever or intelligent. In fact, this review should probably be written in broken crayon on the back of a McDonald’s placemat.
I have nothing new to add to the parade of assumed lobotomy references except to urge Zack Snyder to not make it so easy for reviewers next time. If he keeps this up, I am going to assume that his next film will begin with forty pounds of dog feces being dropped directly onto the head of an innocent person eating Sno-Caps.
A Short Outline of What Went Wrong: Sucker Punch suffers from two distinct problems.
The first is its complete failure to create any sort of meaningful narrative. To be blunt: This movie is dumb and doesn’t make sense and appears to have been written by sleeping frogs.
The second is that it is nothing but the violent sexual exploitation of young women created solely for the profit of the makers and the entrainment of the idle audience and therefore is morally bankrupt beyond understanding. To be blunt: It must have been written by some very terrible and troubled frogs.
Putting these flaws together we are left with not just utter garbage, but utter garbage that is difficult to follow and impossible to care about.
Mechanical Problems: Let’s begin by talking about the dumbness of this film.
A short synopsis: A young woman, called Baby Doll, is admitted to a mental hospital in the mid-Sixties by her stepfather. He has just murdered her mother, and attempted, or successfully, raped her and her sister. Baby Doll, in defense of her sister, tries to shoot him, but kills her sister instead.
This beginning sequence plays out wordlessly, a music video for an excruciation cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These).” In fact, much of the movie acts as a video for a steady stream of late 90s trip-hop-style covers of 60s and 80s pop songs. The fuzzy bass and booming techno drums were supposed to signify “badassness” but rather only signified “This weekend only: 30% off at Spencer’s Gifts.”
At the hospital, the stepfather pays an orderly to have her lobotomized. Then she gets lobotomized. That is basically it.
EXCEPT: At the moment she is lobotomized, everything changes and we are now in a swanky, glamorous brothel. But it isn’t just a regular brothel. Baby Doll and the other young women from the asylum are all sex-slaves. They are being held against their will, cannot leave and are killed if they try.
Essential to the success of any narrative is that there be something, or someone, that audience cares about. The audience must feel that something is at stake. Life and death, freedom and enslavement, happiness and sorrow. There has to be a struggle and there has to be some for the audience to identify with.
I don’t know that pretty young women in panties kicking robots in the face so as to escape a life of sexual violence in a dream is enough to sustain my interest so as to create a successful narrative.
When we descend into the first dreamworld, we don’t care about Baby Doll. She has yet to utter a single word or do anything other than kill her sister on accident during a montage set to a terrible cover. The audience knows nothing about her. Sure, we know that she has come from a terrible home and is in a terrible situation in the hospital, but none of that is about HER. This violence is about those around her only.
We know more about her stepfather and the orderly who commit these violent acts against her and than we do about her. Their violence against her is not who she is, it is not her character, it is not her soul. I feel the filmmakers would say that we know something about her, but instead they seem to only care about what indignity and abuse can be levied against her. Though the movie exists mostly in her mind, all is external to her. She is a mystery.
If when asked, “Tell me about your character,” all that can be said is, “She is abused,” you have not told me anything about who she is. You are allowing the violence to define her and rather than showing someone rising against oppression, you are basically just perpetuating it by erasing her and leaving only what has been done in its place.
The second problem is that this character that we have no connection with is lobotomized and then descends into a dreamworld immediately. We don’t become more attached to her by completely changing the setting and characters. When this works in a movie, such as theWizard of Oz, we already know enough about the characters to care what happens to them in this new configuration. Baby Doll has not yet sung “Over the Rainbow.” She never does.
[UPDATE: Yes, I understand what happens in the movie. The doctor raises his hammer to lobotomize Baby Doll at the beginning of the movie and then brings it down at the end and everything happens in between. I got that. Yes, I understand that five days elapse between when she is admitted and when the doctor arrives and in between she does all sorts of stuff that we don’t see. I understood that too. Because I did not fully explain those points in my review does not negate the glaring problems of this film.]
Not only do we really not know anything about Baby Doll, but we know nothing about the other asylum patients who are now slaves in this terrible, but glitzy, sex-slave den. We are now also required to care about the imagined relationships between these strangers (all who exist only in the mind of a young woman getting a lobotomy).
Hey Zack, don’t you see the problem with this?
“But hey,” Zack says to us, “they are pretty. That’s why you care. They are very pretty.”
Third, by showing us that she is being lobotomized, we know this new setting is just in her head, just a fantasy. We know that the other young women in the brothel are also just in her head. Their deaths, when they come, are meaningless because they haven’t died in real life (or if they have, we don’t know it). There is actually nothing at stake.
It is as if Zack Snyder appeared on the screen and said, “Hey, y’all. Ain’t nothing after this point make any difference. Enjoy.” When he appears, he is wearing cargo shorts and a Body Glove t-shirt.
It Gets Worse: In the brothel-dreamworld, Baby Doll learns that she can escape into yet another dreamworld by dancing seductively. Oh, good! An even less meaningful set of circumstances.
She finds herself in feudal Japan where Scott Glenn tells her some stuff about how to escape and a whole bunch of other horse crap that probably sounded good when it was being written in a hot tub while smoking hundred dollar bills.
(I haven’t mentioned that there is a voice-over at the beginning and end of the movie about how there are angels who help us and how we have find the tools to fight in ourselves, or something. I don’t really remember because I was dead at that point. I died of Dumb.)
It is only at this point, in sub-dreamworld, that Baby Doll speaks for the first time. I noticed from the outset that she was not speaking and I assumed that this was going to be an important point of the movie. She was not going to have a voice until some important moment, if at all.
Yet, at approximately thirty or forty minutes into the movie, she starts talking about tracking snow into Scott Glenn’s temple. Nothing important caused the change. No essential change of character or triumph has given her a voice. Nor is it that she only talks in her most inward dreamworld. As soon as she returns to the brothel-dreamworld, she talks all the time.
At this point, you realize that Snyder just didn’t have anything for her to say until then. “I’m sorry, guys,” said Zack, “I was too busy drawing this little sailor outfit that she is going to wear. I’ll write some lines for the last part of the movie.”
I imagine that Zack Snyder’s breath smells like a thumb.
Germans, Dragons, Robots, Bombs: From this point on, the movie becomes a videogame-style action film with Baby Doll seductively dancing to hypnotize people while the other young women sneak around to gather objects necessary for escape. While they do this, in her sub-dreamworld, Baby Doll and the women fight steam-punk WWI German soldiers and robots and dragons.
It says something that the parts that would be most intolerably laughable in nearly any other film (the fight sequences), were Sucker Punch’s highlights. I am not saying those parts were good, but there were some respite from the unbearable horror that was the rest of the movie.
During the fight scenes, like all who see Baby Doll’s seductive dance, I descended into a dreamworld. In mine, however, rather than fighting, I am best friends with a hot dog. We go on road trips together and work at a hardware store owned by the hot dog’s grandfather. Sometimes, we will just spend the whole day down at the stream, fishing. We never catch anything, but we don’t care. It is just about the friendship more than it is about fish. The spring lasts forever.
Then the dance ends, and I find I am still watching this horrific bucket of piss.
“I Made Me a Good Movie.”: You get the impression while watching Sucker Punch, that Snyder saw Memento or Lost Highway and thought, “Oh, this is how make teh art moviez! Your Oscarz, give me themz.”
I also assume he watched those movies while sitting in a hot tub and eating fried shrimp from a Ziploc bag. I can’t tell you why I think that, but trust me, this is what he does.
But There Are Even Worse Problems: When I as growing up, late at night on cable television there would be these movies about women in prison. They were terrible, low budget films.
The plots of these movies are always the same. An innocent woman is imprisoned, sexually abused and debased along with her inmate friends and then they fight back against their oppressors and triumph in some fashion. On its face, this is a story that we can get behind as we generally like movies about good people triumphing and evil people getting what is coming to them.
Yet, these movies are, of course, nothing more than an excuse to make a movie full of sexual violence and debasement. In a movie like this, the audience are aligned with the abusers rather than the abused, the act of watching being an additional violent insult.
I am certain there are many great articles about women-in-prison movies and unfortunately I do not have the background or the ability to fully dissect what is going on in your typical movie of that sort. I can only say that this is exactly what Sucker Punch is in every repellent way. The only difference is the addition of CGI and the fact that it is PG-13 and playing in every theater across the world.
Let’s Get Specific: Here is a short list of some of the more egregious and awful things that come to my mind about the movie. This list could actually go on forever, but I shall restrain myself.
Clothes: The young women are in a mental institution all wear white dingy white gowns that seemed a little too short. In Baby Doll’s brothel-dreamworld, the young women all wear corsets and stockings. In the sub-dreamworld, where the fighting is done, they wear even less.
I understand and support a movie about women fighting against their oppression. I think that is a good idea. Yet, making them increasingly sexy as they do it seems to undercut that. This is not a realistic depiction of a young woman trying to overcome abuse. It is an animated SI Swimsuit Issue with martial arts and several attempted and successful sexual assaults.
That the women remain scantily clad during their fight scenes, when they are presumably the most powerful, seems like an insult to the characters and the audience and the concept of morality.
“But girls like to be pretty,” said Zack sadly, breath smelling like shrimp, fingers still greasy, hot tub cooling in the California sunset. “At least in my script they do.”
This Movie Is Repellent: At home, Baby Doll and her sister are presumably raped by their stepfather. At the mental institution, she and the other patients are presumably raped by the orderlies. I say “presumably” because the movie, being PG-13, doesn’t show anything other than men moving menacingly toward young women or grabbing them and holding them down. I think it is clear what happens, but by not showing anything, the movie removes the real horror of the situation.
In the brothel-dream world, where they are slaves and have no volition, they are raped by everyone all the time. Of all of the offenses against the young women, this is perhaps one of the worst, but is pretty much glossed over, or played for laughs or fun.
The only place where they are not sexually abused is in the sub-dream world. In that world, they are only beaten, shot at and blown up by mega-bombs.
Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number: The film makes an awkward point at the very beginning to make it clear that Baby Doll is 20 years old. It shows her stepfather filling out her admission form (because what makes for better cinema than hospital forms) and he says, loudly, as he writes, “Age? Twenty-years old!”
Why? Because Emily Browning looks 13. She is called Baby Doll. She dresses in little girl clothes throughout the movie. She still lives at home with her mother and is able to be committed by a guardian without a court proceeding.
By making her 20, and signaling that to the audience, it lets the viewer enjoy the abuse and degradation and sexy clothes of someone they would otherwise assume was a child. But just saying that she is 20 does not remove the unpleasant feeling from the movie that all of the young women are much younger.
This Movie Is Gross: Seriously, this movie is really, really gross. That it got made and that people paid money to see it and that some people even thought it was good is a judgment against us as a culture.
Friday nights, couples on dates, the smell of popcorn, the bubbling of sodas and this is the movie you watch. Sexy women dressed as little girls being beaten by men and a young woman who is almost raped after her lobotomy. This is your weekend.
I would love to tie this up with a joke, but I feel far too bleak.
