Girls, guns and action fantasy

Sucker Punch (2011)
Certified: 14
Duration: 120 minutes
Directed by: Zach Snyder
Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn
KRS release

Sucker Punch is the latest offering from director Zach Snyder that follows very closely in the style already manifested in 300 and Watchmen.

I had enjoyed 300 tremendously as the film had worked on many levels. Watchmen was a more difficult task as the graphic novel had been deemed to be “unfilmable” by many.

With Sucker Punch, Mr Snyder is working from his own script. The film once again shows off his strengths as a very visual director as the mind-bending merging of realities on screen is simply mesmerising.

Mr Snyder knows his strengths and thus uses visuals to bring the script together. While the film outwardly seems to be just about girls with guns, the film delves into the psyche of its main character to deliver quite a sucker punch to its audience by the time the film’s ending comes around.

In the US, critics have attacked it for being sexist in the way the heroines in this film are portrayed and dolled up. One should note, however, that this is a comic book fantasy and follows the imagery associated with this medium with vehemence. These are works of fantasy, yet Mr Snyder opts to leave his characters halfway, in between being sketches and fully fledged persons, which shows off how much this is all a fantasy and there is no underlying agenda on the director’s part.

Set in the 1960s, Emily Browning plays Babydoll, a sweet-looking girl who has been accused of a crime by her stepfather, who is very abusive and is out to get her inheritance. As a result, she is locked up in a mental asylum. Due to her stepfather’s forging of a signature, she is scheduled for lobotomy.

Living in this hellish situation leads Babydoll to retreating further and further into her mind. Imagination starts to take over and she starts to re-enact real happenings with fantastical sequences that she plays at giddy speed.

Each sequence has a metaphorical element to it that represents what she is going through in the mental asylum. Thus, she travels in her mind to a brothel where she joins a group of girls who all want to escape, ends up mired in the trenches of a steam punk based World War I, gets advice from a wise man in feudal Japan and has to fight a dragon.

Mr Snyder provides one cool sequence after another. He is one of the few directors who know how to hit the slow motion button at the right moments and not make the sequence look deadweight.

Some of the merging of fantasies are sometimes tackled harshly. The film’s warping and blending of fantasy sequences is simply magnetic. This is one fetish trip that all geek fanboys will love. The way Mr Snyder melds these sequences with well-known rock classics makes everything look as if it were all part of a magnum opus of Wagnerian grandeur. What is not to love (in a visual manner) about a samurai warrior wielding a gatling gun!?

This is the product of a mind that has read too many comic books, digested too much manga and seen too much anime. I know this as it takes one to know one and Sucker Punch is just the right medication for all the like-minded fanboys out there. After this visual phantasmagoria, I can hardly wait to see Mr Snyder’s version of Superman.