Sucker Punch Review

I have now seen this film on two occasions in the cinema and although movie reviewers have slated it for its lactation of emotional core and a killer plot which inevitably does not cohere as a fully satisfying film, i believe it to be fashioning, impressive and carries distinctive visual constructs from rich source materials. Its one of my latest guilty pleasures. Directed by Zack Snyder and casted by a stunning line up of beautiful actresses are honestly the reason why i went to the cinema in the first place. However once 20 minutes into the film i started to realise its potential and started enjoying it for its unique style and ambitious like quality. With Sucker Punch, though, i finally got to see what Snyder can make with self-mined ore. In some ways, this is his own Inception.

In the 1950s, a 20-year-old girl nicknamed "Babydoll" (Emily Browning) is institutionalized by her stepfather at the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane after she is blamed for the death of her younger sister. Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), one of the asylum's orderlies, is bribed by Babydoll's stepfather into forging the signature of the asylum's psychiatrist, Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), to have Babydoll lobotomized, so she can neither inform the authorities of the true circumstances leading to her sister's death, nor reclaim her recently deceased mother's fortune. Faced with unimaginable odds, she retreats to a fantastical world in her imagination where she and four other female inmates at the asylum, plot to escape the facility. The lines between reality and fantasy blur as Baby Doll and her four companions, as well as a mysterious guide, fight to retrieve the five items they need that will allow them to break free from their captors before it's too late... 

Once Babydoll’s perception has mentally tweaked her grim surroundings from asylum to bordello, we have a faintly titillating milieu of mascara and fishnets giving way not to inventive song-and-dance numbers, but to the fast, furious action sequences which throw just about every fantasy/sci-fi/war cliche at the screen. This happens almost literally: each set-piece is framed within a dance, which begins with Emily Browning’s Babydoll stiffly swaying her hips as we dive into her eyeball and the action, then pulls out again to find her sweaty and exhilarated while her astonished male audience pant almost post-coital. Although i enjoyed this experience when you sit back and thoroughly think about the content of Sucker Punches coerced action it feels less like stream of dream sequences and more like a series of preposterously overblown music videos.

I do believe that If as much attention had been lavished on the characters themselves as on their combat training and costume design it would be a much more successfull film. The story really,as it  turns out, is so dizzied by the artifice of its construction (be that Snyder’s film-making technique or Babydoll’s fevered Rabbit Hole-digging) that we’re encouraged to treat nothing as real, and thus feel no sense of jeopardy — only urgency. Unlike, say, The Matrix (you die in The Matrix, you die in The Real) or Inception (you get killed, you get trapped in Limbo), there’s no reason to fear death in Babydoll’s battlegrounds.

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