HuskyEnzo Review of Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch (2011)

Completing the trilogy which "Van Helsing" and "Sky Captain" began: "Melting Plot III - Moron Rouge"

[1/10 · 6 April 2011]

I got into the car on Sunday afternoon. The friend who invited me for a movie of my choice for my birthday leaned over to me; "This one got a really bad review in the paper," she said. "Look, …" I replied "all I'm asking is that I don't wanna need to think, okay?" Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Sitting in the theater, next to me there sat two smelly noisy guys who commented regularly and loud the scenes, eating nachos like pigs do and apparently thinking they were funny. The sad thing was that after a quarter hour or so they didn't distract or annoy me anymore watching the film. Can there be any worse verdict? After 20 minutes I thought that any movie gets the audience it deserves. The … story … no, I can't call it that way! The film starts with an orphan-story from the cliché-wing. A Britney-Spears-lookalike brat accidentally shoots her sister in an attempt to protect her from their violent father, just briefly after the mother passed away. The greedy pop uses the chance to get rid of the only other heir and dumps her in a lunatic asylum. There the girl is supposed to lobotomized (an irritating "Cuckoo's Nest" reference) and –facing the traumatizing process- her mind disconnects and she "flees" into an imaginary world where she gets abducted, sold to a strip-club (an allegory to the asylum) and practically enslaved with the other girls to dance and to … well to do what can be imagined. In order to escape this fictional joint -into which she actually already hid from reality- she convinces the other dancers of a break-out. To acquire the items they need (knife, fire, map and… uh… y'see?), she mentally flees during her dance-performances once more from that meta-level into the NEXT meta-level, a fantasy-world which is a pop cultural and historical melting-pot of various alternated historical events, steam-punk- and other computer-game-scenarios, Anime/Manga and bubblegum-philosophy. WWII (or WWI?) is one of the settings, as well as "Lord Of The Rings", a Shinto-temple and an OuterPlanet. Goofs found: the Nazi-troopers were supposed to be zombies. Zombies don't mind a kick to the crotch and thereby can't be stopped that way AND they have no use for gas-masks! The mediocre and tension-free action sequences are interrupted by "Baby-Doll's" back-falls to the "reality", the strip-joint, with pseudo-tragic, cliché-drowning scenes and main-characters which show one other of the films most essential problems: it blatantly serves the reactionary and indifferent Arabophobia by introducing the club-owner "Blue", a poorly performed but clearly racism-feeding parody of a Persian. Compared to that, Kevin J. O'Connel's performance in "The Mummy" was balanced, fair and PC. About the way, the factual psychiatric function of Disconnecting as shown here I must say: I'm fairly skeptical. But worse than that, the premise that a traumatized woman seeks relief by mentally escaping into a dreamworld where she gets sexually abused might imply that women dream of being sexually exploited more than anything else. Regardless the fact that rape-fantasies exist and are as legitimate or not as most others, for a movie that addresses a juvenile audience this is simply irresponsible. Another "PPPffffffrrrrzzz" goes out to the character's names like "Baby-Doll", "Sweet Pee", "High-Roller" or the likes; aw come on… As if the author took the promoters speeches from "Mad Max II" for serious. Yes I'm aware that this flick WANTS to play with clichés but face it: it sounds plain idiotic. Period. So all in all this film's premise is basically the pattern-bastard of the terrific "Pan's Labyrinth", where also a little girl in a traumatizing and hostile family-situation during the fascistic Franco-reign in Spain mentally escapes into a- world of unlimited imagination and so beyond life and death. But while Del Toro's masterpiece can even be named in one line as for instance great old European classics as Ingmar Bergmann's "Fanny and Alexander", this kaleidoscope of trash hasn't any own identity, nor any value as a movie-reference-galore. Not to mention any substantial message to take away. As a social-worker who works with mentally ill people for 11 years now, I furthermore have to state that mental institutions in earlier times surely must have been hell. I don't have problems to see that used as a stylistic element or scenario in a movie – not even in a blockbuster. But here it only serves voyeuristic pranksters and feeds the prejudices about mentally affected people in a dangerous way. I'm also an RPG-player for over 15 years now and I must point out, that if ever one of our games-masters would have dared to show up with such a pile of sedative "powergaming" (roughly for "when it's too simple and obvious", such as killing a dragon with one slit – yeah. Sure.), we would have hung the bastard. It's a dance-movie … without dance-sequences, a horror-film …without being creepy, an action-film… with boring action, a war-movie… where you tend to root for Nazis because the heroines are so annoying. I can't believe that this idiotic crap was done by the same man who did the excellent "Dawn Of The Dead"-remake in … 2007? Don't waste any money watching this rubbish, you better watch "Barb Wire" once more (Yes! I mean it!) or best of all: call all your friends and make a complete "Firefly"-DVD-Session over the weekend; at least that was my decision after the "Train Job"-sequence: this series action was better, the characters too, the sexism was more enjoyable and had more style, the wit was funnier – in short: forget this waste. I would have never ever expected that someone could shoot a movie BELOW "Van Helsing" or "Sky Captain…" – but here we are … deeper underground. Trilogy completed. In many years at least we will be able to say: "Oh yes, there once WAS one crappy movie, even Scott Glenn couldn't rescue. What was the title? Hrmmm…"