Every time Zack Snyder directs a new film, ghosts of his 2006 cult hit, 300 , return. Snyder must live with that burden of comparison till he has made a better film than 300. Sucker Punch is not that film.
Coming from the man who also gave us Watchmen in 2009, the new film does reaffirm Snyder’s craft of mixing dark fantasy and stylish violence. But the effect, wild as ever, does nothing new to push the envelope on the filmmaker’s cinematic idiom beyond what we have already seen.
Snyder, like most makers of dark capers in Hollywood right now, has never ignored the importance of eye candy. Watchmen had some, by way of Malin Akerman and Carla Gugino in the butt- kick mode — suitably dressed in slinky tights to augment sex appeal. Fast zoom- ins balanced with sleek slow- mo action makes for a spectacle if the stunts are canned on PYTs. And Sucker Punch gives you an adventure of five heroines (with an eye at the lucrative Oriental market, one among the wild five is Korean- American actress Jamie Chung).
Nattily, the five girls have been given ‘ hot chick’ names too. Emily Browning plays the heroine Baby Doll. Her sidekicks are Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, who isn’t blonde by the way) and Amber (Jamie Chung).
The film unfolds as an action fantasy that mostly takes place in the vivid imagination of Baby Doll. The girl must conjure a world of dreams to escape the sordid reality at hand and become a hero by busting the evil forces. The five girls have been locked away in an asylum against their will. As the lines between real and fantasy blur, Baby Doll takes it on herself to lead a fight to escape their captors, Blue (Oscar Isaac) and Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino).
They must retrieve five items that will help them break free.
That brief synopsis could give you the idea Snyder’s Sucker Punch is influenced by Guillermo del Toro’s global Spanish hit Pan’s Labyrinth , which was about how a little girl lapses into an eerie fantasy world to escape real- life miseries and become a hero in her own eyes by performing three gruesome tasks.
The similarities between Sucker Punch and Pan’s Labyrinth begin and end with the basic idea. Snyder’s comicbookish outlook is very different from del Toro’s gritty style.
This isn’t an incredible film. With a script that is not wholly original, Sucker Punch rides some sexy SFX and sexier heroines as the action, at times bordering on gore, unleashes every imaginable warfare tool from swords to snakes.
Snyder and his co- writer Steve Shibuya reportedly took five years to complete this script. In various interviews the director has said Baby Doll’s spurts of fantasy, which form the backdrop for all the violence to evolve, were inspired by Hamlet ’s ‘ play within a play’ concept. It would have come across more finely if Snyder and company’s focus was less on close- ups of women in tights and more on the film’s potential subtexts.
Rating - 3 / 5
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