Sucker Punched

There are three kinds of bad movies.

There are the ones that are practically willfully bad and clearly have no regard whatsoever for their audiences' intelligence. Everyone involved knows they're making a piece of shit, but they're getting paid, so who cares? These are your Batman & Robins, Jonah Hexes, Clash of the Titans, etc.

There are the ones that are bad, but not maliciously so, and through no real fault of their own in the sense that they had natural limitations--be it budget or actors or plot or whatever--and simply weren't able to overcome them. Getting upset with these movies for being bad is like blaming a toddler for not being able to dunk a basketball. A lot of horror movies and Jennifer Aniston films fall into this category. I'd even throw something like Battlefield Earth in there.

Then there are movies that you can tell started out as labors of love. That the director honestly wanted to make a great film, but somewhere along the way, it just gets away from him and the end result blows. And for some reason, these are typically the most annoyingly bad movies of all. Jersey Girl. Phantom Menace. Lady in the Water. Sucker Punch.

Sucker Punch is an unpleasant film to sit through. It's boring. It's pretentious. It's predictable. It never goes more than five minutes without attacking you with loud music in the background for extended periods of time. (To be fair, though, the soundtrack's pretty good.) To its credit, it is visually stunning. But frankly, that doesn't carry nearly as much weight as it used to. Eye candy's nice, but not $9.50-for-a-matinee nice.

In fact, it looks so good, I rewatched the trailer yesterday, and there are so many really awesome images throughout it--explosions, zeppelins, sword fights, dragons, Emily Browning's midriff--I found myself wondering, less than a day after I'd seen the film, "Geez, was it really that bad? Could I be wrong? Because this shit looks pretty awesome." Then I thought back to how I felt in the theater, being bored and irritated and wondering if this was really all there was to the film, and how aside from exactly two moments of soft laughter, the rest of the audience seemingly feeling the exact same way, and realized, no, I was right the first time, the movie really does suck.

The real problem with Sucker Punch isn't that it's an awfully made film. It's that it's so goddamn lazy, it's indistinguishable from an awfully made film. It dutifully goes from Point A to Point B to Point C to Point D to Point E, relying on one of the most formulaic plots in fiction, where the hero(ine)'s goal is to collect a series of objects for whatever reason. And then, special effects and hot girls in burlesque outfits aside, does nothing remotely interesting with said plot. Even the minor twist at the end feels predictable, probably because Scott Glenn more or less tells you early on there's going to be a twist.

(I'll give Zack Snyder credit for this: Scott Glenn was fucking awesome casting. I wish he could have been in a better movie, but it was great to see him, cheesy lines and all, and he seemed like he was having fun.)

When I was a kid, I would have loved Sucker Punch. In fact, I probably would have assigned it some sort of depth that I'm almost positive it doesn't actually have. Hell, even just a few years ago, I would have been mostly satisfied with just the effects. Now, though? Meh. Sucker Punch isn't a story. It's a lot of moving parts meant to resemble a story. And sometimes that's okay, but for some reason, here, it wasn't.