Review—Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder's made one movie that completely caught me off guard and impressed me*, one movie that completely underwhelmed me**, one flawed masterpiece***, and now, with Sucker Punch, masterpiece flaw.

So... what do I mean by it being a "masterpiece flaw"? Well... the movie is never boring to look at, for one thing. But the longer you look at it, the more you become painfully aware of the fact that what you're looking at is trying SO HARD to outdo itself with every single scene that the only thing it really accomplishes by the end is it makes you tired. I mean... when a movie has a fight with three giant-sized demonic warriors from a samurai's nightmare armed with swords, polearms, gatling guns, and rocket launchers against a beautiful gun and katana wielding blonde who just got armed with her weapons by Scott Glenn, you'd think that you'd come to the end of a pretty over-the-top action movie. In fact, that's more or less how Sucker Punch starts. By the end, I was thinking back to that fight sequence and how mundane it was, after wading through clockwork German soldiers and robots and dragons and so on.

I think my primary disappointment with Sucker Punch was that it ended up feeling like scenes from like 5 different movies that I would have really liked to see the WHOLE movie of, then incorporated one of my least favorite storytelling tropes into the whole thing—the fact that a lot of the movie was just a hallucination/dream/vision. (And no, that's not a spoiler... it's pretty obvious from the start when the really crazy stuff—rocket wielding giant samurai—starts showing up.)

I mentioned above that Sucker Punch is never boring to look at... and while that's true... at places it got boring to watch. In a movie with everything I just mentioned above that ALSO has wall to wall hotties in it... being "boring to watch" is what I'd call the definition of a "masterpiece flaw."

Pardon me... do you know the fastest way to Little China?

Sucker Punch is...

• ... a strong piece of evidence that director Zack Snyder should not write moive scripts wholly on his own, but should adapt scripts from better writers. Like, say, Alan Moore or George Romero.
• ... not helped by being PG-13. Netflix failed me there by not sending me the unrated version of the movie, which while I doubt is much better, at least would have been even MORE over the top.
• ... pretty much what you'll see in the trailer below... stretched out to nearly 2 hours with not a lot more story added to what you see in the trailer itself.

GRADE: C –


*Dawn of the Dead
**300
***Watchmen