Sucker Punch

Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Emily Browning, Abby Cornish, Jenna Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Oscar Isaac
DVD release: 10 August 2011
Rated: M

Eclectic director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) sees filmmaking in a highly visual comic strip configuration. Sucker Punch his new sexploitation movie is certainly an example - memorable imagery but it's all style sadly lacking substance. The characters remain ciphers, without depth. Perfunctory acting won't win any gold stars, the dialogue as much at fault.

Opening like a horror flick Baby Doll (Emily Browning) - appropriately named - having been framed by her abusive stepfather for the murder of her little sister, is rapidly locked away in a decaying asylum making Bedlam look like five-star accommodation.

In this nightmarish incarceration we meet the other inmates, all looking like escapees from a porno shoot, Sweet Pea (Abby Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Venessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). Under the dubious supervision of the weird psychiatrist/choreographer Vera (Carla Gugino) sporting beehive hair, and an inebriated Bela Lugosi delivery.

But hello, we soon find the wacky asylum doubles as brothel, presumably just in Baby Doll's overwrought imagination, and that's only the beginning. For the 'deranged' female inmates have to dance to entice the customers, under the salacious eye of Blue (Oscar Issac) an oily corrupt warden, bearing a striking resemblance to George Cole's Flash Harry in the 1954 The Belles of St. Trinian's.

If you swallow that lot, you'll smoothly accept alternative reality videogame styled battle scenes necessary to inspire Baby Doll to perform her erotic dance routine. Heaven help us. Now all this has something vaguely to do with the planned escape by Baby Doll and her new lusty girl friends; with grotesque characters like those from Delicatessen contrasting the lascivious ladies.

So Baby and company (like Charlie's Angels on speed) victoriously battle all manner of CGI foes from animated dead Huns, Orcs and dragons, killer robots on speeding train with a deadly bomb. The battle with the Hun being the most notable of these for action with the Zeppelin and old biplanes.

The girls as well as Oscar Issac sport more eye makeup than Nefertiti at a funeral, false eyelashes never wilting even after the wildest fights. Emily Browning’s long stockings displaying titillating expanse of thighs and glimpses of nickers under the minuscule skirt in the many wire flying shots.

As mentioned it’s hard to comment on the acting because it’s modest at best. You could suspect Browning (The Uninvited) tries to make sense of her part, when not in slo-mo acrobatics with dead steam driven Germans. The female cast appear chosen for their pulchritude rather than thespian ability.

Zack Snyder might have been frightened by Lewis Carroll in his youth, for surely here we have a sublimated Alice in overdrive. Note the Alice hair band, the almost indecent little girl outfit, and master clue being Grace Slick's “White Rabbit” used loudly over the battle of the Hun. Ironically appropriate “when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead”.

The repetitious nature of the invulnerable Baby Doll fighting a welter of GCI effects, finally becomes just boring. There's not enough dramatic development or emotional involvement to support the flamboyant action. Main requirement of the girls is to be voluptuous at all times, even when fighting overwhelming odds or burbling perceptive lines including “If you don't stand up for something, you'll fall for anything”.

A few striking images may be remembered in amongst the crazy shenanigans, yet in the wash up Sucker Punch simply doesn't deliver. If I might dislocate a couple of lines from the Bard applicable in this instance - “Chaos is come again, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.”

John Bale