By Wren Culp
Staff Writer
Reality is a prison and only your mind can set you free. Everything your mind creates to escape reality, you control. But the question remains, can Sucker Punch control its own world?
Sucker Punch follows the story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a girl locked away in an insane asylum after being framed by her stepfather for the death of her younger sister.
In the insane asylum, she meets Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung), all girls seeking the same thing: freedom.
While in the asylum, the girls are instructed to dance as a way to let go of the harsh realities of the world. And when they dance they enter a new world, one they control.
The girls set out to find five items to use to escape from the asylum once and for all. Using Baby Doll’s dancing to distract the people who captured them, the other girls quietly steal the items. They consist of a knife, a lighter, a map and a key, and the fifth item is a mystery. If they acquire all five items, freedom is in their grasp.
Sucker Punch has one purpose overall, and that is to entertain. Do not go in expecting a Black Swan or a King’s Speech because, if you do, you will hate it. If you plan on seeing this movie, go in just to have fun.
That being said, Sucker Punch is a wild ride. It blends detailed action sequences with state-of-the-art visuals and it never slows down. But while all that is an asset for this movie, it also hinders the plot.
The film’s plot is confusing, to say the least. In the first half hour of the movie, I was already confused about certain things. Something the film was is also drastically missing was is plot structure. The plot jumped jumps around so much that it was is hard to grasp the surroundings and stay focused on what people were are talking about.
Character development is there for Baby Doll, as the first five minutes of the film are slow motion shots of her downfall while a creepy rendition of the classic song “Sweet Dreams” plays. Other than that, I knew nothing about the majority of the characters in the film.
The film deals a lot with freedom and what it means to different people. There is physical and psychological freedom, and the film deals with both aspects. The film also deals a lot with human perception on terrible events and how people react to things, such as pain and death. This is something the film captures well, as it justified most of the events in the film.
The acting by the girls was is mediocre for the most part. Most of the time, they would look at an explosion with a dramatic face and perfect makeup. If that’s acting, they nailed it.
The direction by Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300) was is good when it came to the visuals, but the failing story and the unsatisfying ending leads me to believe that Snyder might have focused too much on the visuals.
Something I want to stress about this movie is that it wasn’t made for story necessarily. I went in wanting to see great visuals along with girls with big guns, and that’s exactly what I got.
That said, Sucker Punch is a total guy movie. With all the visuals and heavy action scenes, there isn’t a lot of time for anything else. Everyone else should take a rain check.
Sucker Punch: C+
