Sucker Punch

You can't help but get incredibly excited when you first see the trailer for this movie, and why shouldn't you? What you basically have, at first glance, is 300 but with all the nearly-nude me replaced with beautiful women, how can you go wrong? So there's a team of female ass-kickers, put into various situations: fighting fifteen foot tall gatling gun wielding samurai, crazy fire breathing dragons and steam powered Nazi robots. This movie has it all! So what happens? Baby Doll is traumatized and unfairly institutionalized by her deranged step-father, where the only way she can deal with the horrible situation is to fantasize.

She hatches a plan where she must collect a variety of objects that will help her and some of her friends escape. The layering is kind of odd: she enters the hospital (reality) then immediately switches into the fantasy version. In the fantasy version she goes deeper, until the end where we are pulled out and have to wonder how much of the fantasy world(s) spilled into reality, and vice versa.

We get lots of Snyder's trademark slow motion insanity, and some absolutely stunning camera work and effects. It's a great thrill ride, and makes me appreciate the medium. But I walked away from it feeling a bit mixed. Did I just watch a special effects roll? Was there any real substance there? Does there have to be? So many questions and no energy to really look into them.

This is where I shelve my discussion on the movie for a week and question whether to even publish this thing. I have nothing very insightful to say about it, and I wonder if that's a testament to this movie being so surface driven you can't derive anything but the most basic premise from it: escapism and I guess, injustice. Perhaps I'm not keen enough to derive much more from it than that. I also feel like this movie will grow on me and that I got exactly what I expected out of it: a highly stylized, exciting popcorn flick. I ate my popcorn and enjoyed my root beer throughout the film, and I must say it all meshed perfectly. Oh, and do yourself a favour and click on the poster above for the full resolution version!