I believe a very good version of "Sucker Punch" exists. It is not the version now playing in theaters, unfortunately.
Director Zack Snyder's outlandish, fetishistic action epic is the latest entry in an increasingly popular sub-genre: the movie that is metaphorically about movies. Like "Inception" and "TRON: Legacy," it operates on multiple levels of "reality" and relies heavily on the audience's sense of nostalgia. If "Inception" is this pseudo-genre's masterpiece, "Sucker Punch" is its noble failure.
On the surface, "Sucker Punch" can be seen as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for teenage girls, a wet dream for fanboys, or both. The heroes of the film are gorgeous 20-something women in a mental institution which the main character, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), envisions as a burlesque harem. When Baby Doll's dancing alter-ego begins her gyrations, she enters another fantasy where she and her fellow inmates are leather-clad, gun-toting vixens who fight towering samurai, fire-breathing dragons, faceless droids and zombie Steampunk Nazis.
In one of her hallucinations, Baby Doll meets the film's only benevolent male character, a nameless sage played by Scott Glenn, who lays out the film's video-game structure: the girls must obtain five items to win their freedom. All of the items are kept by leering, grotesque men who become entranced by Baby Doll's moves long enough for her cohorts to grab what they need.
Here's how it works: Baby Doll begins dancing. Snyder pushes into a close-up of Browning's eyes. Her surroundings morph into a fantasy world, where a completely insane action sequence plays out. That sequence is an exaggerated version of what is happening inside the harem; stealing a map from an office in the harem, for example, plays out as a WWII mission.
This is as silly and random as it sounds. I spent a lot time trying to intellectualize what was happening instead of letting myself enjoy the action, which is rather impressive. Whether or not you think Snyder has an original thought in his brain, you have to concede his prowess with the camera. A shaky-cam sequence in a German trench captures the feel of a first-person shooting game; the girls take on a train-car full of robots in a seemingly unbroken camera shot that careens from wall to wall; and a dragon engages a warplane high above a besieged castle.
But that stuff can only be entertaining for so long, especially when the film has no interest in developing its many characters. Baby Doll is the only one provided with a backstory -- she accidentally killed her sister while trying to fend off her lecherous stepfather -- but nothing about her personality resonates with the audience more than her porcelain skin, her gigantic eyes and her Sailor Moon outfit. Her cohorts are even more forgettable. There's the headstrong loner (Sweet Pea, played by Abbie Cornish); her punky, slightly butch sister (Rocket, played by Jena Malone); the sobbing snitch (Blondie, played by Vanessa Hudgens); and the token minority (Amber, played by Jamie Chung).
Snyder may have intended his protagonists to be blank slates; the confounding narration that bookends the film, combined with its final image of a scarecrow, suggests that "Sucker Punch" is most interested in telling the young women in its audience that they are capable of creating the kinds of worlds that Snyder does, that they can use their imaginations as weapons. (That message would probably carry more weight coming from a female auteur, huh?) The blank characters allow the audience to project themselves onto whomever they prefer.
But there I go again, trying to intellectualize a film that many will see as a callous money-grab, a pastiche of every conceivable nerdgasm. And maybe that's what "Sucker Punch" really is -- though I have to believe Snyder's original intentions were ambitous.
The most interesting and infuriating part of the film comes over the end credits, in which we see the harem's evil overlord, Blue (Oscar Isaac), performing a musical number with the girls' matron, Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino). No context for this is given, and parts of other musical numbers starring the protagonists are intercut with it. (I counted at least three different setpieces.)
"Sucker Punch" was, at one point, a musical, and on-set reports from various film writers confirm as much. Did these musical sequences exist on yet another level of reality within the film? Were they intercut with the action scenes? Would they provide the film with the meaning I am grasping for? (We probably won't know the answers to these questions until the inevitable director's cut is released on DVD and Blu-ray.) One can only assume that executives at Warner Brothers, faced with a very long first cut of the film, told Snyder that the easiest path to trimming the film and successfully marketing it would be to excise the music completely. I don't know if those musical numbers would make "Sucker Punch" a better movie, but they would certainly make it a far more interesting one.
Either way, I am glad to be a movie fan in a time when movies as strange as "Sucker Punch" and "Rango" are earning huge budgets from Hollywood studios. While I can't say I liked "Sucker Punch," I do admire its all-out insanity, and I eagerly await what Snyder has in store for his adaptation of "Superman." His career path suggests a Tim Burton on steroids, a highly skilled visual artist who puts a new spin on old material. He has yet to match the perfection of his "Dawn of the Dead" remake, though "Watchmen" aimed very high and mostly connected (for me, anyway). If "Sucker Punch" is his first true failure, it's an awfully spectacular one.
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