[Movie Review] Suckerpunch

“Looks like a Netflix rental to me.” – My brother.
So, after being blown out of the theater, yes, the front speakers were turned up waaaaay to loud. Where do we begin?
Do we begin with the entire internet comparing this farce of a plot to Inception’s use of levels of time? Yes, let’s.

Suckerpunch is nowhere near Inception’s quality of writing and those who actually even attempt to compare it should be forced to watch something atrocious. Maybe Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four or all of Battlestar Galactica 1980. Oh, wait, some of you might actually eat that up. Let’s move on…
Suckerpunch’s plot goes like this: Our heroine, “Baby Doll” played by a peroxide blonde Emily Browning who has no other name than the name given to her by captor Blue played by Oscar Isaac is sent to a mental ward in upstate Vermont when she foils her step father’s attempt at raping her baby sister. The step father is none to pleased to find out his recently dead wife left all the money to them so he whisks her off to the mental ward. The cliches continue to pile up until Baby Doll finds out she has five days before she is given a lobotomy by Jon Hamm. The rest of the girls consisting of Abbie Cornish, Jenna Malone, Jamie Chung and Vanessa Hudgens in the ward are introduced and through some thinly veiled psycho babble at the hands of Doctor Gorski played by Carla Gugino Baby Doll immerses herself in her own paradise where she meets her guardian angel/Obi Wan Kenobi in the form of Scott Glenn.
Most of his scenes are shown in the trailers so he can spoon feed the audience the plot. Why exactly are we being spoon fed the plot? This can’t be so hard to understand.
Oh, right, I forgot: Jettison the mental ward plot and you’ve got a kick ass movie.
The fact that Baby Doll is living in two fantasy world’s, the first being the one to escape from reality and the second being her imagination is where the parallels to Inception can be drawn. And, this is where Suckerpunch falls flat on it’s face. I believe in a machine that can created a alternate reality more than Baby Doll’s paradise drenched in wide strokes of Kirowsawa, Anime, Steampunk/Zombie WW II and I, Robot Science Fiction. The problem comes from the fact the scenes of Baby Doll’s home has no books of said genres that could drive her imagination to conjure these images.
Instead, we get the pedophile stepfather in the middle of a thunderstorm and quickly shuffle her off to yet another cliche. Wait, I paid $8.00 for a Lifetime Movie?
The only consolation is to ignore the reality plot line and let yourself drown in the fantasy worlds which I loved. Zach Snyder has done Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen, the guy knows what he’s doing and the SFX shows. The recent animated shorts by Ben Hibon on Apple Trailer’s Suckerpunch page that set up each of themed missions Baby Doll on Co venture to is perfect plot fodder. I don’t care if they go from one genre/era to another. A mashup is what great science fiction is all about. Make it about the group of women each from a different eras/planets/callitwhatyouwant (since most of their outfits were different eras to begin with) pulled together by the wise old man to kick ass and I’d eat it up.
So in closing, for his fourth movie, Zach Snyder fired a Netflix rental. It could have been epic but instead we get a PG-13 mess of a movie.
Here’s hoping his rushed reboot of Superman doesn’t crash and burn like Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns.