Sucker Punch (2011): Being Sucker Punched By Zack Snyder Is No Fun At All

by King Hazard

The title says it all, the feeling you get when you leave the theater and feel like you have been sucker punched out of two hours of your life and money. Giving Zack Snyder’s record for movie making, it was a surprise to see such a wasted attempt of action and eye candy, then again, perhaps that’s what the title suggested.

The movie starts out with a girl trying to defend her little sister, but accidently kills her and is committed to an insane asylum. In five days she will have a lobotomy, and it’s at about this moment that the movie jumps into her mind with meaningless fantasies that have no real danger or link to the actual plot. The plot itself would probably be 15 minutes without the wild imaginations, and this girl has the imagination of a 10 year old.

The fantasies all begin within another fantasy. The girl “Babydoll” enters these worlds when she starts dancing in the previous fantasy, which is confusing enough. We are then taken through a world of Samurais, where she has to defend herself and we don’t really know why. In the second world, her friends join her as a group of commandos who need to steal a map and are given advice from some old guy that was in the earlier dream with the Samurais. The guy gives a cliche talk and the girls are off fighting an army of undead soldiers. In the third world we jump into some fantasy where the girls fight a dragon and Babydoll finishes it off with her sword, and finally we enter a world of robots where the girls have to disarm a bomb before it reaches some unknown city.

Girls with swords fighting Samurais, dragons and robots is a cool concept, but we have to have a reason to care about what happens in the dream world. There has to be a link to the real world and implications, similar to how the Matrix or even Inception gave us something to care about. Both movies took place in worlds that weren’t real, yet whatever happened in that made-up world also effected the real world, it wasn’t just some empty dream or fantasy. Sucker Punch doesn’t bother to give us that sense of danger and so falls flat, unless you’re a teen boy.

Even if there were a plot, the movie visuals themselves seem like something out of a video game, while looking good in the trailer, with long stretches in the movie, they just are not that impressive. Even if the CGI looked real enough, we still only have a hollow fantasy that is all pointless. The entire movie felt like five different films rolled into one without any connection to the one before. We never really get a sense of a story, which leaves us to wonder how the script could even go as far as to make it to theaters. Do these filmmakers even take a look at the film before they decide to put it out? By the end of the movie, we were left with an empty feeling, and then we realized it was Zack Snyder punching us in the wallet.

Source: Spiffycats