Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is a combination of decadent musical and dumb video-game adaptation. It’s built on a storyline set in “reality”, from which it escapes to musical numbers (video-game levels). The storyline, however, does not work and is here only to hold all of the fantasy-action detours together. And these detours, in which the heroines destroy Nazis, ninjas, dragons and orcs from The Lord of the Rings and robots from I, Robot, do not work for more than the first ten minutes, because they are merely a visual exhibition without any innovation. You might find some similarities to Tarantino’s Kill Bill in the way this film’s script is constructed, but Tarantino is “a bit” better screenwriter than Snyder – his storyline was more solid and developed through the individual episodic detours. The detours that make up Sucker Punch are self-serving, meaningless and bring nothing to the story. It is a pulpy mishmash that must have looked like a disaster waiting to happen when it was still only on paper. (24/03/2011)

I love Zack Snyder in Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead, but I don’t like him in the silly 300. Sucker Punch is much worse than 300, thanks God that I didn’t go to the cinema for it. This is just pointless teenage fantasy that pretends to have a meaning. I’m not able to argue why I think it only pretends so, because this time I couldn’t be bothered to look for it while watching it, and I just don’t want to think about this film any further. Even the action is not that exciting. A fail of biblical proportions. (18/06/2011)

It's you... Nazis, zombies, robots, dragons, and samurais versus a group beautiful girls. In other words, six reasons why Sucker Punch could never succeed globally. It has everything you can imagine when you want in a big, opulent, bombastic blockbuster, yet the world couldn't handle such an explosion, because having all those winning strokes in one movie is just too much. Zack Snyder is clearly fulfilling a number of fantasies and despite a few reservations, I have to cheer him on. I could do without the somewhat forced contrast between the makeup-laden fantasies and the depressing reality (the latter of which, ironically, I actually liked more), but in the end, it's because of where the story is headed that the ending almost knocked me off my feet. Not only will I never see such a one-of-a-kind romp this year, I doubt I ever will again. And now, grab a katana and Baby Doll can start dancing. (19/06/2011)

A teenage One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in robotic Ninja underpants. A stupid shooter with a bunch of affected chicks in suspenders, acting as if they are in a cheap American porno, framed by a kind of pseudo-spiritual chatter about the power of man. What really disappoints me is the fact that Zack's visual montages are bombastic, but they completely miss the point – I don't know if it's their non-originality or that they are terrible self-serving, but Sucker Punch seems to me to be a wasteful mess that obscures the complete absence of soul with excess effects. It just confirms that Snyder is an excellent short film maker (although Sucker Punch lags behind the rest of his work in this regard) and that he leads the actors very benevolently – as long as he has solid material in front of the camera, it disappears, but once those revived teenage fantasies ring out, the result is disastrous. One advantage of this nonsense is that Watchmen seems like an even bigger miracle to me. But that's it (I curse myself now that I gave 300 such a low score...). P.S. The unreliable narrator has never been as unreliable as in this film (which takes away all his credit and effect). (23/03/2011)

A film of two extremes. At one point it's a perfectly flaring, greatly entertaining, action-packed and almost ingenious ride full of energy and spectacular shots, whilst at other points it's a dragging, boring and stupid show of meaningless dialogues. The sequences where the viewer has fun or is bored alternate regularly. Whenever someone started talking, I tried to look at the ground and not listen. Terrible. On the other hand, when the shooting started, I couldn't look away from the screen. Fantastic perfect worlds. The film was worth seeing just for the German soldier zombies from the First World War powered by a steam engine with a watch. Great. But all of this gloss is wrapped in a dull story set in a nuthouse, which is completely useless and uninteresting. Sucker Punch is like a really beautiful painting set in a really ugly frame. Overall, it’s average. (26/03/2011)