Sucker Punch (12A.)
Directed by Zach Synder.
Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Carla Gugino, Oscar Issacs, Scott Glenn. 110mins.
Imagine Paris Hilton and a cast dressed like they were in an anorexic remake of a Russ Meyer movie in a cross between Kill Bill and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest where the action is interrupted every 20 minutes or so by lengthy (not actual gaming footage) trailers for the latest PC shoot ‘em up: imagine all that and you still won’t be imagining anything as pitiful or deluded as Sucker Punch.
Posturing vacuum Zach Synder has had varying degrees of success working with other people’s ideas (300, Watchmen) but this time we get to see the workings of his own mind. I think most adolescent males have at some point succumbed to the idea that their masturbatory fantasies are in fact great flights of imagination – lad's mag sauciness rendered with the visual flourish of a Fellini and encased in a stream of consciousness worthy of Ulysses. The rest of us soon have such delusions knocked out of us; Synder though somehow persuaded Warner Bros to hand over $80 million for him to go out and make his into this sexless and depressing dirge.
The film is structured as a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy; an elaborate arrangement concocted by a young girl Baby Doll (Browning) who, as a way of dealing with being unjustly incarcerated in a cruel gothic Dickensian lunatic asylum, decides to escape into a fantasy world where she in trapped in a cruel gothic Dickensian brothel. The final part of this frightened young girl coping strategy is that her every lap dances is portrayed as elaborate fantasy action sequences.
Any resemblance between events in the film and actual human behaviour is entirely coincidental. That the plot centres on a noble lobotomy is a fine irony, trumped only by the notion of a film about the liberating power of imagination that doesn’t have any.
Synder is supposed to be some kind of visual wiz but Sucker Punch bores the eyes as much as it insults your brain. While everybody else is stampeding towards 3D he is heading in the other direction, his CG fanaticism has the effect of flattening everything, even a rather talented cast. It’s like watching a play made up entirely of background scenery and cardboard cut outs.
Often movie reviewing can seem like plotting a voyage from one nadir to the next but Sucker Punch is something else, somehow lower than all those sequels, franchises and romcoms. It didn’t quite have me recalling Transformers II with affection, but at least that film’s inhuman bombastic shallowness was delivered without pretension.
Directed by Zach Synder.
Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Carla Gugino, Oscar Issacs, Scott Glenn. 110mins.
Imagine Paris Hilton and a cast dressed like they were in an anorexic remake of a Russ Meyer movie in a cross between Kill Bill and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest where the action is interrupted every 20 minutes or so by lengthy (not actual gaming footage) trailers for the latest PC shoot ‘em up: imagine all that and you still won’t be imagining anything as pitiful or deluded as Sucker Punch.
Posturing vacuum Zach Synder has had varying degrees of success working with other people’s ideas (300, Watchmen) but this time we get to see the workings of his own mind. I think most adolescent males have at some point succumbed to the idea that their masturbatory fantasies are in fact great flights of imagination – lad's mag sauciness rendered with the visual flourish of a Fellini and encased in a stream of consciousness worthy of Ulysses. The rest of us soon have such delusions knocked out of us; Synder though somehow persuaded Warner Bros to hand over $80 million for him to go out and make his into this sexless and depressing dirge.
The film is structured as a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy; an elaborate arrangement concocted by a young girl Baby Doll (Browning) who, as a way of dealing with being unjustly incarcerated in a cruel gothic Dickensian lunatic asylum, decides to escape into a fantasy world where she in trapped in a cruel gothic Dickensian brothel. The final part of this frightened young girl coping strategy is that her every lap dances is portrayed as elaborate fantasy action sequences.
Any resemblance between events in the film and actual human behaviour is entirely coincidental. That the plot centres on a noble lobotomy is a fine irony, trumped only by the notion of a film about the liberating power of imagination that doesn’t have any.
Synder is supposed to be some kind of visual wiz but Sucker Punch bores the eyes as much as it insults your brain. While everybody else is stampeding towards 3D he is heading in the other direction, his CG fanaticism has the effect of flattening everything, even a rather talented cast. It’s like watching a play made up entirely of background scenery and cardboard cut outs.
Often movie reviewing can seem like plotting a voyage from one nadir to the next but Sucker Punch is something else, somehow lower than all those sequels, franchises and romcoms. It didn’t quite have me recalling Transformers II with affection, but at least that film’s inhuman bombastic shallowness was delivered without pretension.
