You would be forgiven if you thought “Sucker Punch” was a new videogame from the makers of “Watchmen.”
But no, “Sucker Punch” is a new movie from the makers of “Watchmen.” It just looks and acts like a videogame. In fact it is a hybrid. Call it a goovie or call it a mame. Judging by the title, I’d go with the latter.
In the new mame by Zack Snyder, Emily Browning plays Babydoll, ringleader of five inmates at a remote mental hospital in 1960’s Vermont. She is committed by her evil stepfather after the accidental death of her baby sister.
Along with fellow inmates Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung), Babydoll plots her escape. To distract their overseers, the women perform racy dance routines as they conjure in their mind’s eye battle-scapes populated with zombie soldiers, fire-breathing dragons, killer robots and gargantuan samurai.
Snyder has proven himself to be a strong visual stylist and the action scenes in “Sucker Punch” are some of the most arresting you will see this year. Snyder has also proven himself to be a director who struggled with actors in previous films and the same holds true here.
Among his core cast, their greatest accomplishment is looking credible as a kick-ass team of five, dispensing with horrific otherworldly menaces while dressed like porn stars.
Overseeing them are Oscar Isaac as the evil warden, Blue, and Carla Gugino as the sinister-seeming but maternal Russian stereotype, Madam Gorski. Gugino is sexy and silly while Isaac is sorely miscast exhibiting all of the menace of a spoiled schoolboy.
By the time we get to the first big action scene, we have bumbled through enough hammy acting and clunky dialogue to last us the rest of the movie.
“Sucker Punch”s saving grace is the fact that Snyder keeps the dialogue to a minimum and focuses on his strengths. When the synthesized rampage underscoring Bjork’s “Army of Me” rises on the soundtrack, and Babydoll turns her sword on a trio of samurai giants, “Sucker Punch” levitates exuberantly, lifting the audience with it.
A later action scene is set in the trenches of World War I where German zombies running on steam and clockwork guard a critical map. There are dogfights, exploding zeppelins and hyperbolic havoc before the girls alight from their trip, returning to the bleak chambers and hallways of the asylum.
Snyder makes his writing debut with “Sucker Punch,” a movie that seems authored by someone who can count from one to ten, only not in that order. There isn’t much sense to the dream-within-a-dream screenplay and trying to figure it out is not only maddening but beside the point.
Snyder is clearly less concerned with narrative cohesion than with spectacle and vision.
“Sucker Punch” fails in areas we usually ascribe to good drama such as story, character and theme, but is spectacular in areas we often ascribe to good cinema such as vision, scope and innovation. The new movie astutely foresees the coming showdown between videogames and movies for primacy in the pop culture bazaar.
No doubt there is an army of teens and twenty-somethings eager to see “Sucker Punch” and it will likely translate to strong box office. They will embrace it for its inspired visuals and cartoon violence just as older audiences will reject it for the same reasons.
My rating: *** (out of four)