TITLE: Sucker Punch
STARRING: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Oscar Isaac, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn
DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder
STUDIO: Legendary Pictures, Cruel and Unusual Films, Lennox House Films, Warner Bros. Pictures
RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 125 min
RELEASED: March 25, 2011

By Justin Polak
Co-founder, Ambassador to the Mushroom Kingdom

Any frequent reader of ours might remember that Eric already wrote an official review of Sucker Punch back when it was released. Some of you might remember that Eric didn’t have too many nice things to say about it. When I visited his house the other day, it struck me as very odd why I saw a Blu-Ray copy of Sucker Punch. Oh, I pretended that it wasn’t a big deal. Plus, sometimes it’s fun to watch a bad movie here and there.

We had half a handle of near bottom shelf vodka at our disposal, so we drank a bit while we ate an early dinner. Eric then said he wanted to watch Sucker Punch, and I nearly left right then and there. I haven’t seen the film, but everyone I know who has hated it, plus there were many negative reviews to back up my prejudice. My “friend” basically ignored me while snickering manically, and my pleas to put on a good movie instead were shunned and ignored.

At this point I realized that I already had two heavily mixed vodka drinks flowing through my system, so I might as well watch Zack Snyder’s soft core porn. Well, that was what I gathered from watching the previews, anyway. I recovered from my experience with Zookeeper, so maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad experience in comparison.

Of course, the movie opens with a ho-hum cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” while the protagonist, who will later be known as Baby Doll, is saddened by her mother passing away. Not too long afterwards, her stepfather finds out that his newly deceased wife left her inheritance to Baby Doll and her little sister. The stepfather flies into a predictable rage while a storm intensifies in the background, and he throws crap around in slow motion. He locks Baby Doll in her room and immediately sets after the little sister who locked herself in a closet.

Fearing the worst, Baby Doll acquires a gun and climbs down the outside of the house from the second floor to stop her stepfather’s rampage. Right when he kicked down the door of the closet the little sister was hiding in, Baby Doll appears and holds him at gun point. She takes a shot at the stepfather’s head from maybe four or five steps away, misses completely and hits a steam pipe in the closest that ricochets right into her little sister’s neck, I guess? They never show the fatal hit, just Baby Doll leaning over the body in horror and blood appearing on her hand after she touched an area around the neck.

Already I’m not buying this. The bullet manages to shatter through an overhead closet light that is well above her little sister’s height, first of all. Secondly, what the hell is a steam pipe even doing in a closet? If I had a hot steam pipe running though my closet I would be freaking out! What if you wanted to put on a old shirt you haven’t worn in awhile and forgot about it? Naturally, the article of clothing would be in the back only for you to severely burn your hand or find a melted hanger all over your shirt! Alright, the movie shows it’s a rather decent sized walk in closet, but still. Would you want a steam pipe (two of them, actually) running through your closet? I thought not!

What really baffles me is that the pipe gets a nice, neat puncture hole and the bullet still bounded back AND downwards towards a small child’s neck! That’s one magic bullet! Jesus, was Baby Doll using the same weapon that killed JFK? Hell, the top of the steam pipe even looks like it’s well below the hanging closet light the bullet first hits. I seriously keep rewatching this scene as I am writing this, and I can not for the life of me figure out how this bullet hit the little sister. They don’t even show her in any shot after the gun is fired. The bullet abuses physics worse than any Matrix movie and then boom, sister’s dead. I’m not even five minutes in and none of this shit makes any sense!

Baby Doll then thinks about taking another shot at her stepfather now cowering on the floor, but drops the gun and runs to her mother’s grave, where eventually the stepfather and a few cops track her down. Baby Doll is admitted to a mental hospital because the stepfather paid off one of the orderlies.

In the middle of my third drink I drunkenly call bullshit. There was no actual investigation into this matter? The authorities just bought the stepfather’s story, which turns out to be Baby Doll going crazy and killing her little sister due to being distraught over her mother’s death, just like that? No one found it odd that a shooting incident took place near a man who recently learned that his dead wife left her inheritance to her children, one of them being a legal adult? No one saw a big ass shoe print on a door that wouldn’t belong to a bare footed 20 year old woman leading to a closet where a small child was found dead? Even if they took Baby Doll’s prints and found that she fired the gun, this was clearly a case of self defense gone horribly wrong. Yes, women’s rights were terrible in the 60s (the time period when movie takes place) at times, but Christ, this is a clear cut case of wrongdoing by the uncle if I ever saw one.

You could say the stepfather paid off someone up top, but why wouldn’t they explain or show it? He pays an orderly off two grand to lobotomize Baby Doll, so he had the money, but the film makes it look like the authorities bought the crazy little sister shooter theory.

It looks like all is over for Baby Doll, but right when it appears that she is about to be lobotomized, the movie suddenly switches to a perspective of a stage act in a brothel. What. At this point I was guessing this was some sort of dream sequence, but the rest of the movie carries on like this…up to a point. Much like in The Wizard of Oz, you see familiar characters in different roles in said brothel. I was already four heavy drinks in and I found myself not caring anymore. I also notice Eric keeps looking at me out of the corner of my eye. I think nothing of it as I continue watching the movie.

Eventually we learn that Baby Doll’s virginity is going to be sold to a man known only as the High Roller. She’s brought to a dance studio of some sort and is forced to practice.

After she begins to dance, we are then thrust into ANOTHER world where Baby Doll projects herself into weird, foreign and half-assed anime environments. Um, okay. So she meets some wise man aptly known as the Wise Man, who looks like a damn Vulcan, and tells her she needs five items in order to escape. A map, fire, knife, key, and a fifth item that would call for a great personal sacrifice. Did it just sound like I described the set up to a video game? Yeah, well, get used it. Also, get used to Wise Man saying a variation of, “Oh, and another thing…,”because he’s the type of wise man who thinks its really deep to give critical information at the last second in a desperate attempt to sound deep and witty. He says something like that in every scene the dude is involved in. Fuck you, Sarek!

Baby Doll then fights three samurai-like warriors about two and a half times her size in a snowy feudal Japan backdrop because that makes your fighting scene more serious. Also, these samurai-like warriors apparently follow jRPG rules since they have the courtesy to attack her only one at a time. Any viewer who hates obvious green screen should be pissing a flame trail towards the screen by now. It seriously looks like Baby Doll is running in front of a giant HDTV at several points with a video game playing in the background. I could almost smell the mixture of coffee, air conditioning and stage lights while this supposed battle was taking place. If you’re one to think the digital sets in the Star Wars prequels looked terrible, you’ll down right roll your eyes out of your sockets at how fake this action sequence looks.

Suddenly, Eric busts out laughing as hard as he can while pointing out that he should see my face. I take a look over at him, still laughing, while his face is looking so cartoonish that it would put Vince McMahon to shame. He then puts his hands up to this face with the back of them facing outward while he curls his fingers, laughter approaching maniacal levels. As he starts to rock back and forth, Eric screams, “I PUT THIS SHIT ON TO PISS YOU OFF!!! IT WAS MY PLAN ALL ALONG!!” I can only writhe in agony as I reach the point where my body is telling me to stop drinking, but my mind doesn’t give a fuck. One of my best friends has betrayed me with a movie about the kind of shit Zack Snyder masturbates to upside down hanging from his shower curtain. If Eric shat in his hand and threw feces at me as a practical joke, I would have been less offended. It all made sense now. The mysterious text I got the previous night, baiting me to hang out with him with promises of booze! Eric had my number and I was no ensnared in his trap! His pain is now transferred to me!

It turns out that the dancing in the brothel world is so good, the viewer conveniently never sees it. Oh, and Baby Doll’s dancing puts everyone in a trance. She then befriends four other women. Their nick names are Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber. They all reach an agreement to use Baby Doll’s dance as a distraction to get the items from her original dance vision in order to escape. However, Blue, a mobster who runs the brothel, and looks like the orderly the stepfather paid off, seems to be suspicious of the girls.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Snyder meant for this movie to portray women empowerment partially. Personally, I think he’s full of shit for obvious reasons, like having most of the movie set in a damn brothel, and that when Baby Doll goes to her video game world, the other four girls and herself are dressed in preteen masturbation fantasy outfits. You could say Snyder was countering the imagery by having the girls kick all sort of ass during the video game sequences.

Not on Blue’s watch! Every time a moment of potential women empowerment moment builds up, he rushes in the room like a fat kid looking for free cake by threatening, taunting, smacking and murdering “his” girls to keep them all in line. The thing is, one of the girls considers giving up at one point, and another eventually betrays the team!

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT!!

Going back to the video game hallucinations Baby Doll experiences while she dances, there’s several different levels to be seen. She fights in a World War I backdrop with steampunk German soldiers, a Lord of the Rings like castle filled with orcs/dragons and a futuristic train ride to a giant city. I realize that all off this might sound cool if you haven’t seen it, but aside from general green screen problems I mentioned earlier, all of the video game-like action sequences are so damn boring. Only Zack Snyder can take hot women with various popular backdrops and make it look less exciting than wiping your own ass.

Long story short, only Sweat Pea and Baby Doll are left near the end of the movie, and they use the necessary items to escape the brothel. However, they get near the front gates and find many sleazy patrons are waiting outside (thanks to the fire alarm that was set off). It is then revealed that the fifth item was (surprise) Baby Doll’s self sacrifice to let Sweat Pea escape on her own.

The film suddenly shifts right back to the lobotomy scene, and Baby Doll was indeed lobotomized. However, while the brothel and video game scenes were in her head, it turned out that they had real life consequences. Baby Doll did actually set a patient free, set a fire and perform various other mission objectives in the real world. The doctor who performed the lobotomy immediately questions why the procedure was done as it turns out the real life Blue faked the signature by Dr. Gorski, who was the dance instructor for the girls in the brothel world. Of course she calls the cops as has Blue arrested.

Cut to Sweat Pea in real life at a bus station. Two cops stop to question her as she is about to board a bus, but a bus driver who looks like Wise Man convinces the cops to back away after telling them a fake convincing story. Sweat Pea gets on the bus and they drive towards the sun set with a conveniently placed scarecrow in the shot, as if you didn’t get they were still referencing the Wizard of Oz by now.

I know I kind of blew through the rest of the movie, but what the hell else am I supposed to say? When I poke fun at a movie, I sometimes like to go off the deep end and explain how I feel while making up obviously fake exaggerations. Turns out, Sucker Punch did all the work for me! One of the girls pilots a robot mech during the World War I scene! Two orcs get launched at a plane while our heroines assault a castle with conventional weaponry! A battle takes place on the set of Final Fantasy XIII with killer robots!

Some have said that Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is like watching him play with a real expensive set of action figures in random intervals. Sorry my friends, Mr. Snyder goes far beyond that. He’s not playing with action figures, or even a whole toy set. Sucker Punch is watching a grown man burn money while waving his penis at you in the middle of traffic. He knows he can get away with it, and he doesn’t give a fuck what you think about it! He got a green light to make his personal sexual fantasies on the big screen under the weak mask of women empowerment! So allow me to close out this rant with just as much thought and effort as Zack Snyder puts into his films.

The REAL sucker punch is that Snyder can make shit like this film, and we have to look forward to his next project–the Superman reboot.

RATING: Zack Snyder Is Going To Totally Fuck Up Superman Worse Than Doomsday/10

Asylum photo from brightestyoungthings.com, all other Sucker Punch stills from nathanzensapien.blogspot.com. Pyramid Head from megabearsfan.net, Doom elements from smackaay.com, Ganondorf from gamerdna.com, Yamoto Man from megaman.wikia.com, Street Fighter elements from ms3306-michael-hall.blogspot.com, Smirnoff box from karanewman.wordpress.com, Zack Snyder photo from newsok.com.