Sucker or Suffer

Summer’s just barely here, yet it feels like Hollywood’s annual summer blockbuster onslaught has already begun.

For starters there’s Sucker Punch, a much-publicized action-fantasy from the director of 300 and Watchmen, which comes at an interesting point in director Zack Snyder’s career.

In 2006, Snyder delivered a monster hit via 300, using a stylized look that owed much to computer generated imagery, video games, and A LOT of slow motion.

In 2009, Warner Bros. gave him the go-ahead to adapt another graphic novel, the ‘80s classic Watchmen. Though this film wasn’t so successful, his follow-up, the all-animation Legend of the Guardians (2010), performed better.

Snyder’s immensely commercial sensibilities were such that he has now been tasked to reboot the Superman film franchise.

But first, he wanted to do a “passion project” titled Sucker Punch.

For the first time, he’s working on a film not based on previously existing material, but one whose story he actually conceived.

Zack Snyder’s brilliant “concept” means that when the girls aren’t in sexy action costumes, they’re in sexy dance outfits!

In a nutshell, Sucker Punch is a story about Baby Doll, a young woman committed to a mental institute after an accidental shooting.

In the asylum, she is faced with a new set of horrors and tormentors from corrupt officials to lecherous staff and imagines herself in different fantastic scenarios in order to survive and deal with her new surroundings.

The result? An almost literal mixed grab bag. Snyder throws everything but the kitchen sink into this movie, allowing him side-excursions into genres like war, science fiction, and fantasy.

He tries to have his cake and eat it too, but while the flimsy framework of the story allows for such digressions, the tiny details things like characterization, dialogue and story become collateral damage.

His overdependence on montages, slow motion, and blunt exposition remain present.

Stabs at depth aside, one thing Snyder will never be blamed for is subtlety. There’s voiceover narration to prepare you in the beginning for what you’re about to see, but in case you didn’t get it, the narrator returns at the end to explain everything.

Snyder’s strength, though, has always been his visuals. And while there may not be a whole lot going on underneath the surface, it sure is pretty. He wisely cast actresses who are easy on the eyes the better to dispense all the action and fantasy with.

In a movie that’s mostly eye candy, Jena Malone (as Rocket) is the sweetest.

The action choreography is appropriately intense and fun to watch, with Jena Malone a particular standout (she’s the only one who can convince the audience she knows how to handle an assault rifle).

The art direction is lavish, with help from street/graffiti artist Alex Pardee, whose style fits with Snyder’s tormented landscapes of a fragile psyche.

Check out his design of a robot with a cute bunny painted on the front, or the Nazi steampunk zombie soldiers the girls fight in one sequence. Another scene looks like it was lifted from Silent Dragon, another comic (drawn by a Pinoy!).

We should be grateful Snyder’s not writing the next Superman film, just directing it. Sucker Punch is a cream puff of a movie: not filling, certainly not healthy, but it sure is appealing to the eye. If you’re in the mood for it, maybe you’ll get a kick out of it. If not, you may just feel like the sucker in the title.