Sunday, July 10, 2011

Portentous Title, Indeed

I had serious reservations about Sucker Punch. The way the film was marketed, everything I had heard, all the reviews I had read, all of it made the movie out to be nothing more than the feverish, masturbatory fantasies of a repressed fifteen-year-old. I mean, the trailer featured hot chicks in skimpy clothes killing shit with swords and guns while dragons attacked Nazi-unicorn-zeppelin-biplane pirate ships, for Kali's sake.

Okay, maybe the absurdity wasn't quite to that degree, but nevertheless the movie looked like a shameless, pandering cash grab. After all, Zack Snyder is a human and humans love money to the extent that scruples don't matter, provided enough money is thrown at the individual in question. The overall high quality of one's previous filmography in no way disallows one from creating schlock to buy another four dozen solid gold potato peelers.

When one of the customers whose opinion on film quality I trust rented the movie and returned it with a solid recommendation, I was flabbergasted. “Are you sure you're talking about the same movie I am?”

“Yeah, positive,” says the customer, pointing at the case with a disc reading “Sucker Punch” within. “Aside from some weird jumpy shit near the beginning and end, it's a solid movie.”

Well then. Away we go.

There is indeed some “weird jumpy shit” in the movie, and one of the complaints I regularly have seen leveled against the film is that the “weird jumpy shit” is confusing. Except...not really. Not really at all.

Emily Browning has been committed to an asylum by her jackass stepfather so she is unable to claim an inheritance after her mother died. Said jackass stepfather bribes Oscar Isaac, a corrupt employee of said institution, into forging papers recommending Emily for a lobotomy. Said lobotomy is to take place five days hence.

Meanwhile, Carla Gugino is the resident psychiatrist and, in this asylum, group therapy takes place in a large, dirty room called The Theater. Emily has no desire to live the life of Randle McMurphy, so she concocts a plan to escape. Enter the “weird jumpy shit.”

See, one of the things that I really enjoyed about this movie (I'll get to the other one in a second) is that it has a cohesive plot and uses metaphor and allegory to tell a cinematic tale. The “weird jumpy shit” is actually a form of mental escapism used by Emily in which she and a bunch of other girls are dancers in a brothel run by Oscar. Once she's inside her fantasy world, she goes deeper, Matrix-style, into the domain in which all the hot chick asskickery occurs. Some found it apparently confusing, but I found it to be a simple and straightforward concept to grasp. Perhaps people need to play some Dungeons & Dragons? They should at least read up on the coterminous, overlapping nature of the Material and Ethereal Planes and how from the Ethereal Plane one can “go deeper” into the Astral (and, holy crap, you can even go from the Astral to other-other places!).

That's the basic plot. The film's emotional climax is rather predictable (I guessed right away what form a mysterious McGuffin took once its super-secret “you'll-know-it-when-you-reach-understanding” existence was revealed to our protagonist) but doesn't really detract from the plot; cliches are not bad. The asskickery is marvelously executed, but this is Zack Snyder we're talking about. The man knows how to do action. The visuals are overall splendid, as well. One thing I found refreshing, for a change, was the limits placed on depictions of violence (and there's a damn lot of that) due to the PG13 rating. I don't think the movie would have been nearly as enjoyable had it had Watchmen-like levels of realistic gore.

Why do I say this? It brings me to the second major point of approval I have for this film: it's the most positively feminist movie I can recall seeing in a good long while. It features a cast of strong females who are thwarted time and again by conspiring, asshole men without creeping into the violent pseudofeminism of revenge flicks, nor portraying all males as straw men (heh) who simply exist as punching bags for the creator's message. Hell, my favorite character in the movie is a Cool Old Guru played by Scott Glenn. But he never overshadows the female leads; he gives guidance and provides objectives only. Instead he leaves the women to their own devices when boots hit the ground and requires them to do their own heavy lifting in a quest for freedom.

I only have one real quibble regarding the movie; near the end, the girls have to hijack a bomb from a train before it reaches its destination and explodes (again with the metaphors). They have to wade through a legion of angry robots to reach said bomb. What follows is roughly four minutes of spinny camera syndrome; the thing where the camera rotates around the focus of the scene as the other stuff unfolds. It had happened to a smaller, more palatable degree at points earlier in the movie, and while I appreciate on a technical level the gorgeous attention to detail provided by bullet-time shots of severed robot parts falling to the ground, it just got boring after the first minute. It was the only time during the movie I felt disconcerted and even confused. That all the robots were identical and posed no real threat at all to our leading ladies made the scene even more tiresome. The camera just wouldn't stop spinning spinning spinning around Emily and her companions as they hewed their way down the entire length of a train and left a trail of robot corpses in their wake.

Aside from that, though, I really cannot find any other serious fault with the film. Does this make it high cinema? Well, no. It doesn't offer any truly deep insight or message. That there are feminist overtones to the film doesn't mean the movie is a feminist movie; if I cared enough to put the effort into it, I could find that sort of thing in many other films. The structuring of the movie's plot into ogre-like layers of metaphorical reality is refreshing and well-done, though. At the end of the day, Sucker Punch is an action flick, albeit a well-done action flick that certainly doesn't deserve all the hate it has received from movie critics more famous and wiser than me. I highly recommend it.

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