I’m pretty sure that Sucker Punch officially marks the end of sex in Hollywood. If Zack Snyder can get a blank slate, and a blank check, to craft a fever dream about prostitutes in fetish outfits and somehow make it through the entire film without a hint of actual sexuality I guess it’s time to call it a day. Could somebody tell Paul Verhoeven to hit the lights on the way out? That would be great, thanks…
Sucker Punch is a trip to the subconscious mind of a director who thinks that ‘subtlety’ is hard to spell. The film reads like a Hot Topic checklist: violence, kinky outfits, girl power, anachronistic sci-fi/fantasy settings, and the concept of sexuality without any of the complications – or pleasures – that come from actually having sex. Emily Browning (The Uninvited) plays the enjoyably named Baby Doll, whose mother dies and leaves everything to her daughters. Her abusive stepfather conspires to send Baby Doll to an insane asylum and bribes a nurse to have her swiftly lobotomized. Just before the needle strikes her frontal lobe she’s transported to a horrifying fantasy world much like her horrifying reality, in which the asylum has been replaced by a prison-like whorehouse, and her fellow inmates are prostitutes who never have sex for some reason and conspire to escape their brutal captors.
Is this all in the mind of our mentally violated protagonist, Total Recall-style, or is this strange reality an actual reality, Total Recall-style? These questions are of no consequence. For all the posturing and ponderous voice-overs about empowerment and whatever the hell else they were talking about Sucker Punch has no greater ambition than to be badass. And I suppose that it is. Baby Doll’s power fantasies are all exquisitely shot and flamboyantly choreographed special effects orgies in which she and her army of virgin prostitutes defeat legions of steam-powered Nazi zombies and giant dragons and enormous robot samurai. Pubescent boys and girls alike will probably think it’s all rather nifty; in fact, my ten-year-old self reads that previous sentence and feels those first pangs of curious manhood, even though he has no idea what it means. My adult self, on the other hand, is acutely aware that it means nothing, even on the surface.
Like the superior Return to Oz before it, Sucker Punch portrays a young girl’s horrifying commitment in a ‘pre-actual-psychiatry’ psychiatric institution through the veil of her disturbed imagination. The outlandishness of her dreams perfectly balances the Russ Meyer-esque persecutions she suffers, but their actual content doesn’t make any sense. There’s no indication that Baby Doll was even remotely interested in anime, science fiction or fantasy before her incarceration, and in fact the film’s period setting (somewhere around World War II, apparently) makes the conceit almost inconceivable. These are not trips into the subconscious mind of our protagonist; they are trips into the subconscious of Zack Snyder. It’s a cool place to visit, but it has no right to be in Sucker Punch. If the entire film was written as an excuse for Snyder’s phantasmagorical wet dreams that’s fine, but it’s a poor excuse. The story is about sex. The movie is about everything but.
The plot revolves around Baby Doll’s preternaturally erotic dance moves: She turns men into quivering masses with her raw undulations, distracting them long enough for her cohorts (played by professional sexy people Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and some others who get less screen time) to steal the items necessary for their escape. But we have to take all of this on faith. Not one second of screen time is devoted to Baby Doll’s performance: every time the music starts she begins listing idly to the left and – if we’re lucky – to the right, and the puerile sexuality is then illustrated via over the top action fantasies which supposedly represent her lust for freedom. Actual lust need not apply. Zack Snyder literally confuses sex with violence, and I fear for young audiences who will accept this truly bizarre fetish from a film that claims to be about regular, old-fashioned bizarre fetishes. The closest these prostitutes come to actually doing their jobs is a brief shot of rubbing some guy’s clothed chest. Snyder can use his enormous throbbing budget to realize the most incredible action sequences ever filmed, but he can’t even provide the kind of titillation you’d find in a mediocre Madonna music video made for a fraction of the price.
Sucker Punch didn’t need sex to tell its story – it’s an action movie, obviously – but the plot revolves around it anyway. I can’t fathom why. Snyder clearly finds these women attractive but apparently has no idea what to do with them. I imagine him as a young boy, finally getting a pretty girl to sit on his bed only spend the entire afternoon showing her his comic book collection. I imagine him the same way as an adult. Sucker Punch seems like it was made by someone who has heard about sex but considers it a distraction from their action figures. Those action figures are really, really cool, but they’re no substitute for human interaction, sexual or otherwise, or indeed a movie that makes one iota of sense.
Crave Online Rating: 4.5 out of 10
