I recently watched a little movie known as Sucker Punch, written and directed by Zach Snyder. Now, I'm not going to mince words. I'm just going to come out and say it: this was the worst movie I have seen in years. I'd rather have a nuclear warhead shoved in my eyeball than watch that movie again*. Words can barely described why and how I hate this movie, but I am going to do my best in order for you, the readers, to understand why this movie needs to be avoided like the plague that it is.
First of all, I am going to lay all of the blame on Zach Snyder. A friend of mine once described him as a thirteen-year-old boy. The description is accurate. Sure, 300 was an enjoyable leather speedo-encased man-fest, and even Watchmen was a good adaption of the graphic novel with extremely gory and graphic scenes throughout; so I knew from the beginning that I was walking into a movie made by a man who enjoys two things: sex and violence - as many men do. Heck, even I enjoy a good action-packed film. But Suck Punch. This movie was every wet dream that all horny adolescent boys have ever had. It was disgusting. It was tacky. It was pathetic. The excuse that this was the first movie that Snyder has ever written is no excuse - this was just taken from a page from all of his sexual fantasies and brought to the screen. Snyder, someone needs to Sucker Punch you where the sun don't shine.
Now the story. This will be tricky to describe because there is no story. Even now I am having an incredibly difficult time deciphering the plot of the movie. It's been described as "Kill Bill meets Inception", and I can see where they get that, but I am grossly insulted by whatever moron dared to compare those two great movies to that piece of garbage.
The film begins with a wordless narration paired with a cover of a classic rock song to describe the story of a pig-tailed, bleached blonde, beautiful young woman who is grieved and horrified to learn that her mother has died, and her evil step-father is probably responsible because we need see him enraged to discover that in her will the mother left everything to her two daughters. Then Snyder does his classic and overdone throwing of something flammable into a pit of fire, thus creating an explosion (haven't seen that one before, Snyder). Evil stepfather turns on the girls, first locking up our heroine so that he can more easily get to the smaller and weaker daughter. Heroine manages to escape her locked room, but too late to save her sister. Distraught and holding a gun she dramatically doesn't kill her step-father. I know, beautiful, right? Step-father predictably locks her away in a mental institution that is made up entirely of beautiful young girls, and run by a cliché crooked orderly who takes money from the step-father to ensure that our heroine, who's name we come to learn is Baby Doll, won't talk and tell the truth about what really happened. Then we get another wordless sequence set against another cover of classic rock song to show the hell of being in the insane asylum. Then suddenly the story changes, and we're taken to a gritty bordello where the beautiful women who we saw in dramatic but silent shots of the hospital are the performers.
All of this is weird and weak, but the most infuriating part of this terrible movie is how pathetic the driving plot of this movie is. Of course, the girls want to escape, but they just can't! There are too many guards who are watching them too closely (but do we ever see these guards that are supposed encompassing this place? no). But Baby Doll is determined to escape. How will she do it, you ask? Well, she has a secret weapon - she has a sex tease dance that is hypnotic to any man who watches her, thus allowing the sexy squad of heroines to steal specific items from the dazed men; items like fire, a knife, and others that can only be taken from specific men because those things aren't common. But the great thing is that we never see these sexy dances. Every time Baby Doll begins she closes her big brown eyes that are weighed down by the most obscene fake eyelashes ever, and she is taken to different worlds where she and the gang of girls must fight zombie-Nazi-soldiers, dragons, ogres, and robots with giant guns and a samurai sword in bustiers and midriff-revealing school girl outfits. Super sexy. But the plan, the brilliant and not needlessly convoluted plan, fails. And the end results are tragic, where the only one who escapes in the end is the oldest girl of the bunch - the one who has been complaining the whole time about how it's too dangerous and they shouldn't even try to escape because they'll get killed. Yeah. Being killed is so much worse that being a sex slave in a disgusting third-world equivalent of a Moulin Rouge from hell. What's more at the end of the movie, we're back to the mental institution, where (apparently) this was all an elaborate metaphor to describe the last five days for Baby Doll before she gets a lobotomy that was scheduled for her by the evil orderly. He gets caught and Baby Doll, thanks to the fact that she is a human vegetable, is now free from the prison that is her life. Tear for how beautiful and precious this story is.
Trash, crap, drivel, any negative name that you can give this film that is what it is. The only, and I mean only, redeeming quality of this movie is the fact that Jon Hamm is in the movie (for about three minutes total), and even that is a little depressing.
I know that this has been my longest and most detailed review yet, but I feel that I have a duty to everyone to describe how awful this movie is. If you're a horny boy who wants to get his jollies from hot young women wielding giant weapons, then have a ball. But if you have any dignity and any self-respect, not only will you avoid this movie, you'll try to kick Zach Snyder and who ever green lighted this movie square in the nuts if you ever get the chance.
*nuclear missile in the eyeball joke is from Kathleen Madigan - one of the best female comedians out there.
