Goodness gracious me, what a bizarre movie. You might be forgiven for thinking Sucker Punch is made by some weird-ass Japanese computer gamer with a cavalier attitude to storylines and a fetish for just-18 teeny porn, his head having been scrambled by all that manga and anime.
But it is in fact directed by all-American Zack Snyder, who put together the historical fantasy 300 and the graphic-novel adaptation Watchman. He is lined up, also, to take the helm of the newest attempt to get Superman off the ground.
Sucker Punch is about an abused young woman called Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who is put in a mental home by her abusive stepfather and scheduled for a lobotomy, presumably so her abuser can have the pleasure of her body without the trouble of her mind. We are told nothing else about her, so she barely registers as a character, let alone as a “real” person. This appears to be taking place sometime in the 1950s, if the production design is anything to go by; at the same time, this 1950s young woman has an imagination that can project her into the 21st century of computer games, where she is a sword-wielding avatar in her own right.
Or something like that.
It’s hard to work out, not because the plot is complicated, but because it makes certain imaginative leaps that one is not always able to follow or trust. The plot, such as it is, is simple. Baby Doll tries to kill her abuser and is thus carted off to the funny farm and her lobotomy promised by the institution’s sleazy superviser (Oscar Isaac). As she arrives, though, a drama workshop is in progress, and we and she are told how this is a form of therapy for the inmates.
Date with destiny
Immediately Baby Doll’s imagination goes into overdrive, and instead of an old mental hospital she is now incarcerated in a brothel. She’s a virgin due to be deflowered by a “high roller” (echoes of Pretty Baby and Twin Peaks), when he arrives in four days’ time, a date with destiny that coincides with her scheduled lobotomy in madhouse-world. In the meantime, in brothel-world, she’s got to learn to dance for the punters, under the supervision of a woman (Carla Gugino), who had moments earlier been seen as the drama therapist, Dr Gorski. For reasons unexplained except by the vivid imagination of Baby Doll, Dr Gorski speaks in a heavy Transylvanian accent.
Baby Doll’s vivid imagination also allows her to trip out into game-world, or some such computer-generated parallel universe, where she and her pulchritudinous cohorts (her fellow inmates/prostitutes) have super-martial-arts skills, plus various fancy weapons, plus a withered guru figure (Scott Glenn) to teach them the ways of this computer game in her head. He also directs them in their near-suicidal imaginary missions, such as finding a baby dragon and cutting its throat to gain access to two magic stones that, when struck together, produce extraordinary rays of light that —
Oh, for heavens’ sake, why am I bothering to try to get this described correctly? It matters not, even in the teeniest tiniest way.
For Sucker Punch is so contrived, so obviously an excuse for getting from one action sequence to another, that to care a whit about the characters in the asylum-brothel would seem otiose.
Stick-thin killer-girls
That wouldn’t really be too much of a problem if the action scenes were interesting or original in any way, or in fact meant something, but I think they represent only the repetition compulsion that gets gamers back to their XBoxes or PS2s first thing in the morning — same old warriors fighting the same old baddy creatures, all moving round in that jerky acrobatic way.
Well, not quite the same old. Are there a lot of computer games featuring stick-thin killer-girls wearing what seem to be outfits drawn from the ancient annals of schoolgirl porn? Or fitted out in those tacky little French-maid ensembles, accessorised with thigh boots? I have no idea, and I don’t want to find out.
Such things put me in a state of mind guaranteed only to generate maudlin laments for the decline of Western civilisation.
One idea in Sucker Punch has or had promise — the idea of someone stuck in a loony bin imagining her way out by thinking it’s a brothel, though that may seem to be jumping enthusiastically from the frying pan into the fire. At least in brothels you just get deflowered, not lobotomised. A story about the leaps of the imagination, which are only partly controllable by the imaginer, would be an interesting way to investigate precisely the kind of fantasy structures that make movies and computer games possible.
But Sucker Punch is not interested in being interesting, or at least not interesting in any thought-through way. It’s about as self-reflective as an ant. As a cinematic exercise it feels entirely mechanical, as though all the humans in it had been replaced by computer-generated automata. Which may in fact say something about the lobotomy theme, which ends in heroic or heroinic self-sacrifice. Perhaps the message is this: Want to enjoy this movie?
Get a spike through your prefrontal lobe.