Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
For a visionary auteur whose sensibility has altered the cinematic landscape, Zack Snyder gets a bad rap. And of Snyder’s films, few get as bad a rap as Sucker Punch—perusing its Rotten Tomatoes page, one sees adjectives like “repellent” and “senseless” and “pointless” accompanying a rating of 24 percent fresh.
Those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions, however, might find a pleasant surprise. Snyder’s 2011 film is by no means a perfect picture—but it’s an exciting, entertaining piece of work, one that subverts your expectations even as it plays to your presumptions.
For all the complaints about modern movies lacking coherence and cohesion, you’d think that Sucker Punch would get a bit more credit for its opening sequence. In the opening five minutes—after a brief narration informing us, “Everyone has an angel; a guardian who watches over us”—Snyder spins a short, silent film, a prologue that deftly announces the stakes and the setting.
It is the essence of “show, don’t tell” filmmaking. In the hands of a lesser director, the introduction of Babydoll (Emily Browning)—and her dead mother, abusive stepfather, dead sister, and exile to a mental hospital—would’ve taken thrice as long and involved endless exposition. Instead, the images tell the story: the evil old man’s lascivious sneer; Babydoll’s tenderness for her sister; her willingness to risk life and limb to protect the young girl. As Snyder’s camera lingers on a gun, a spinning button torn from a dress, and a girl at her mother’s grave illuminated by police flashlights, we fill in the rest.
This sort of subtly slick storytelling and assertive scene setting is not what Sucker Punch or Snyder is best known for, but his ability to quickly and cleanly put us in the midst of a story has been a highlight of Snyder’s work since he burst onto the scene in 2004 with Dawn of the Dead, one of the few remakes to surpass its source material. Watchmen fills audiences in on an overly complicated backstory—one in which Nixon is president in the 1980s, when the film is set—by offering a montage of superhero-laden tableaus: The Enola Gay delivers its payload with a painting of The Silk Spectre on its fuselage; The Comedian flees the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, 1963; Dr. Manhattan accompanies men on the moon.
Similarly, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice uses its opening moments to succinctly retell Batman’s origin story before thrusting Bruce Wayne into the middle of the action during Superman’s appearance in Metropolis, chronicled in Man of Steel. It’s a brilliant sequence, one that calls to mind the horrifying helplessness of 9/11: Wayne is the most powerful man on the planet—a billionaire who controls a vast business empire and is also an Olympics-caliber athlete—and yet there’s nothing he can do to stop the aliens from toppling buildings, killing tens of thousands. The grim rage on Wayne’s face as he stares skyward is all you need to know about why these two heroes find themselves in opposition.
Rather than a subtle, competent piece of storytelling, Sucker Punch is considered an aria of excess, an overblown exercise in fan-boy prurience. This is understandable but unfortunate, a stigma that ignores the subtle ways in which Snyder is not only reveling in genre conventions but also tweaking them.
Sucker Punch is structured something like a nesting doll. There’s “reality,” the run-down mental hospital overseen by Blue (Oscar Isaac) to which Babydoll and her newfound friends Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) are confined. To cope with this, the girls imagine it as a high-end burlesque, using their seductive techniques to steal items needed to escape the brothel/hospital. And the dances they do to distract the men they’ve targeted introduce us to another reality, one where the young women are masters of martial arts and trench warfare, where they take on orcs and dragons or robots on bullet trains.
At first glimpse, these scenes feel like a mishmash of nonsense and clichés thrown together willy-nilly for nothing more than cheap thrills. After all, this is a movie where a character climbs into an anime-style mecha in order to defeat German steampunk zombies, where a B-25 leads an attack on a medieval castle that hides a dragon in its heart. Overstuffed? Perhaps. But the craft of the filmmaking here is undeniable—Snyder choreographs these sequences as well as any western filmmaker working today. The action is fluid and well choreographed, moving from shot to shot with precision and coherence; he understands how a fight should flow and guides the viewer’s eye across the screen.
All this takes place while the soundtrack plays high-tempo remakes of well-known songs (Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” is reimagined by Emiliana Torrini; The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” by Skunk Anansie; Bjork’s “Army of Me” by, well, Bjork (and Skunk Anansie). And the action always kicks off when a mysterious old man played by Scott Glenn utters a cliché that has little to do with the combat about to take place: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”; “Don’t ever write a check with your mouth that you can’t cash with your ass,” etc.
You can snicker at the movie’s absurd novelties—where else will you see a young woman gun down a 50-foot samurai?—or you could step back and think about why Snyder is piling tropes on top of mashups on top of clichés in a movie that is, at heart, an exercise in empathy, a plea to consider the supporting characters in each of our lives. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, and it’s not until you finish Sucker Punch and immediately begin rewatching it (as you undoubtedly will, desperate to unravel its intricacies) that you realize the film’s opening narration was voiced not by Browning as Babydoll but Cornish as Sweet Pea. Snyder is mucking about with perspective, playing with (and preying on) your expectations in order to subvert the expected outcome—to remind us that we are all empowered to be the change we want to see in the world.
I’ve described Sucker Punch in the past as an interesting failure—I’m not sure the whole worlds-within-worlds thing works, exactly—but this isn’t a complaint. Snyder’s reach may have exceeded his grasp here, but it’s refreshing that someone is out there reaching, stretching, expanding the visual landscape and putting forth something new.
Sonny Bunch is the executive editor of, and film critic for, the Washington Free Beacon. He’s also a cohost of The Substandard podcast and a contributor to the Washington Post.
