Sucker Punch
Action fantasy. Starring Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung and Abbie Cornish. Directed by Zack Snyder. (PG-13. 109 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director ("300," "Watchmen"), he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, "Sucker Punch" - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time. Or at least not a complete waste of time.
With other action directors, even some good ones, you get the sense of people working mechanically - that they have an idea for something they want to see and then assemble it, using actors, props and computers.
But Snyder seems to work internally and intuitively, so that no matter how overpowering the action, there is always room for unconscious inspiration, for details that make only psychological or emotional sense: A young woman has her blouse ripped by her stepfather, and Snyder pauses to show the shirt button, in slow motion, twirling to a stop on the floor.
That moment occurs in the brilliant first sequence of "Sucker Punch," a miniature silent movie in which our heroine, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), endures the death of her mother, brutalization by her stepfather and commitment to a nightmarish mental institution. All this is communicated with style and specificity and with shots that reverberate through the mind: a blue eye staring out in horror through a keyhole.
Snyder gives us a film that takes place in three worlds, or rather levels of consciousness.
In the first world, which we take to be the real world, Baby Doll has been institutionalized and must escape before she is given a lobotomy. In the second world, which might also be real, she has been sold into white slavery and lives in a brothel with other women, where she has to dance for customers. Finally, the third world is made up of Baby Doll's fantasies, the dreams of destruction, triumph and freedom that she has every time she dances.
In this way, Snyder is attempting to do something similar to what Guillermo del Toro did in "Pan's Labyrinth." In fact, he's trying to go del Toro one better: Instead of giving us two parallel worlds, he is giving us three, each commenting on the other.
Indeed, the very first time Baby Doll goes into her dance and lands in some ancient temple, fighting three armored monsters, it seems that Snyder's inventiveness and imagination are without limit. Yet, ironically, it's precisely at that point that the limits of "Sucker Punch" are defined.
This film marks the first time that Snyder has made a film from his own original story, and everything that's wrong with "Sucker Punch" - and, in the end, fatal - derives from that story.
All too soon, the movie degenerates into a formula, one in which, at certain intervals, Baby Doll dances and we, in the audience, are force-fed another action sequence - each one longer and less interesting than the last.
The story of Baby Doll's attempts at escape, the real story, is abandoned for interminable stretches.
Moreover, in a film whose approach must be justified in psychological terms, there are nagging imprecisions. Whose fantasies are these? What are the parallels, either factual or emotional, between the actions in one world and the next?
In a sense, these are the little things Snyder needed to work out meticulously, if only for the sake of letting his imagination run free within these wide constraints. Instead, we get the opposite, an imagination cramped by too unsure a grasp of what will fit and what won't.
In the end, Snyder confuses going ugly for getting serious, and he destroys his movie completely.
To talk about the acting in a film like this is pointless. The young women are decorative, images to be manipulated or sometimes just photographed lovingly, paired in front of mirrors as they talk, looking at each other, their reflections looking elsewhere. They're fine, but this is Snyder's show all the way.
I just hope he doesn't misinterpret what I expect will be the reception of "Sucker Punch" as punishment for being artistic. It's just a bad screenplay. Not everyone has to be a writer. To be a first-class director is rare enough.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/24/DDDL1IIRNT.DTL#ixzz1He9ONVIA
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