Rouge Floyd: (One Flew Over) The Wall

Finally.

Sucker Punch:  I like all kinds of movies.  Funny stuff, sad stuff, fantasy, thrillers, sci-fi, Oscar bait, animation, documentaries, drama (pronounced like 'AlabAma', of course), and, yes, check-your-brain-at-the-door movies.  I don't believe everything has to be Citizen Kane.  Or On The Waterfront.  Or Dog Day Afternoon.  The only caveat here is that a movie simply has to be good.  You're probably thinking, "Well, duh..." and I guess you'd be right, but what I'm trying to convey here is it's only OK to check your brain at the door if what you're being fed stands out as something worth your time.  The two (so far) Transformers movies are check-your-brain-at-the-door (CYBATD) flicks, but they're fucking awful and therefore give a bad name to the, er, genre (yes, I'm calling it a genre.  What.).  Besides, even CYBATD movies should at least make you think after the credits roll and you're home on your couch with your kitties and beer.

Sucker Punch is a CYBATD movie.  And it's worth your time.  The plot: a girl ("Baby Doll" played by Emily Browning) pisses off her evil stepdad who wants her family money, tries to kill him, accidentally kills her sister, and gets sent to an asylum and scheduled for a lobotomy to keep her quiet.  She copes by imagining the world as an alternate reality in which the inmates are all oppressed dancers and hatches an escape plan with the help of some of the other girls.  To distract anyone in her way she "dances" for them, and in order to convey the emotions she requires she lets her mind escape that world into a hyper-realized, genre-spanning realm of orcs and zeppelins and guns, oh my.

Trust me- it plays out much better than I could possibly put in writing.

So, the movie lets you know right off the bat that you're not seeing a straightforward drama about a maverick mental patient that inspires her fellow inmates.  The first five minutes are quite literally a music video for Browning's rendition of 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)'.  Much like Moulin Rouge meets the video for 'Janie's Got A Gun'.  Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Zach Snyder was inspired by Moulin Rouge when he wrote and directed Punch.  Well, that and Pink Floyd: The Wall.  And One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.  Throw all those in a blender, press the 300 button, and viola! 

Where was I?  Right.  Not a straightforward drama... blah, blah, blah.  OK.  Here's the deal- it's a kick-ass movie with really, really awesome action sequences, set to the music of Queen, Björk, and some remakes of Jefferson Airplane, The Pixies, The Stooges, etc., by some musicians I've never heard of.  And, really, it's these sequences that are worth your hard-earned dollars.  Yes, they play out like a nerdy fantasy/sci-fi/war nut ate some mushrooms and started rambling into a dictaphone... but with style, man.  I mean, giant demon samurai, steampunk WWI soldiers, dragon vs. airplane dogfights... Scott Glenn...

It's like a big, crazy genre mashup extravaganza.  This pleases me.  If a good portion of your movie takes place in a character's id, it certainly shouldn't be shackled by any one idiom.  And somehow Sucker Punch manages to throw in all but the kitchen sink without feeling like Zach Snyder blindly fired a shotgun and called the carnage "art."  And as crazy as each of the worlds he creates are, they have boundaries and the action never steps outside of them.  Yes, you can try and outrun a dragon over a medieval castle overrun by orcs in a vintage 1914 airplane, but she's probably going to catch up to you and beat your ass.  Or chew off your ass, as it were.  There's definitely some order in all the chaos.  Which is good because ordered chaos is, like, a director's job, and stuff.

This is not really a "performance" movie, but it should be noted that there are some good ones.  Carla Gugino (Dr. Gorski/dance instructor), Oscar Isaac ("warden" Blue Jones/club owner), and Jena Malone ("Rocket"- inmate/dancer) are all solid.  Isaac, especially.  That guy is fantastically creepy.  Emily Browning was really good, too... even if her role is more about unspoken emotion than dramatic speaking.  And she's cute as a button, yo.

The cinematography is, yes, like 300 was... but I'm a fan.  I like the "paintings come to life" aspect of it all.  The "real world" is a cold, drab, florescent-lighted purgatory.  The dancer-world gets some color added to the mix, but the walls are still faded, pea-green, peeling...  The fantasy world is a warm, orange-and-brown post-apocalyptic extravaganza of stone and steel.  They really did a fine job of giving these worlds their own specific feel, visually.  Pretty great stuff.

The sound design was appropriately bombastic.  I mean, this movie is an extravaganza for the senses, so when a bomb goes off behind our heroes, you're going to hear it behind you.  Airplanes whoosh over your head and bullets fly by your ears while White Rabbit is pumped straight out of the screen and at your face.  Subtlety be damned, jack.  And I saw it in a very LOUD theater.  I hope you can, too.

Something needs to be said about the portrayal of women in this movie.  If you check out the posters, or the trailer, or really any of the advertisement art of Sucker Punch you may say to yourself, "Oh.  So this is a movie where women dress up in fetish outfits and wiggle their stuff for the slow-motion cameras, eh?"  In fact, no.  I can tell you fo' sho' that ain't the case.  I think Snyder did a pretty good job in keeping it grounded in "girl power."  That is to say, the movie isn't about feminism, and I don't think it's trying to say it is, but "gratuitous" and "misogynistic" are certainly not words I would use to describe the filming of our band of sista heroes.  In fact, the use of the fantasy sequences in place of the actual "dancing" that Baby Doll does for her oppressors is, I think, Snyder's comment on the inner strength of women.  But I'm just a dumbass male, so I really couldn't tell you.  Fo' sho'.

So, I really want to give this movie a better rating than I'm going to.  I certainly wasn't disappointed, and I'm psyched to watch it on the Blu-Ray in a few months, but there were a few times that I found myself slightly underwhelmed.  Never during the crazy fantasy stuff... in fact, if the movie had been all that I would have no complaints... but during the, uh... "second tier" world (the one where they're all dancers and the warden wears a zoot suit) I started to feel the repetition of the story.  Go get next item to aid in escape, dance for oppressor/enter fantasy world, lather, rinse, repeat. It's obvious that this was a serious passion project for Z-Snydes.  I mean, he wrote the story, co-wrote the screenplay, directed it, and produced it (with his wife)... and sometimes having that much control is a bit too much.  I used to say the same thing about Batman Returns- Tim Burton directed and co-produced that one, and it was a little too Burton.  There's only so many clowns on motorcycles crashing through snow-covered cobblestone streets that I can watch before I'm overwhelmed by style-over-substance.  Sucker Punch definitely fares better than that one... maybe (and I'm gonna contradict myself a bit here) because Snyder also wrote SP and was therefore, unlike Burton, not trying to force his aesthetic onto someone else's story.  Anyway, I can sort of see the same issues brought to the table- no one was reigning Snyder in.  Just because you can do anything you want doesn't necessarily mean you should.

And please don't get me wrong here- Sucker Punch is friggin' cool.   The issues I mention only get in the way because the fantasy world is so very fully realized while the dancer-world is a little nebulous and the "real world" is almost non-existent.  That said, I've heard some talk about how the movie was cut down a bit for its PG-13 rating.  Makes me wonder if we'll get some kind of director's cut for its home release, and if a DC will help the odd pacing and maybe flesh out the confusing bits.  I don't know much about these things, but in my mind I imagine Snyder got everything done his way during filming and the initial editing, but then had to make some cuts for the Brothers Warner that hurt the flow of the movie.  Anyway, the DC of his Watchmen (not the "Ultimate Cut") certainly improved that film, so I have hope.  Or maybe I should just shut up, sit back, relax, and check my brain at the door again.

(I want to give it an 8 but for now it's a) 7 out of 10 Steampunk German Zombie Soldiers (with the sincere hope that a Director's Cut really ties the room together)