There is a scene at the beginning of Suckerpunch, where rain streaking a car window coalesces into the title of the film before sliding away again. It’s a neat trick that no doubt cost more than the entire budget of The Last Seven. Having no budget doesn’t mean that you have to make a bad film, of course, and having an articulated lorry full of used notes and a warehouse full of RAM-crammed servers doesn’t, by the same token, guarantee that you’ll make a good film. Oh dearie me, not a bit of it.
In zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, Babydoll, our preternaturally tiny protagonist, is committed to a skanky looking asylum by her apparently abusive step father who wants to get his hands on the inheritance she’s due since her mother passed away. That and the fact that she shot and killed her younger sister. Sure, she was aiming for the abusive step dad, but still. It seems to me if you shoot, and kill someone, take your fucking medicine, no? The place is a rundown, corrupt, filthy bedlam, run by the nefarious orderly Blue. He arranges it so that that Babydoll will get a lobotomy in 5 days time, for a certain price of course, nullifying her as person, and thus passing on the inheritance to the dastardly step dad. Babydoll then reverts to a fantasy world in order to escape from this living hell. The asylum turns into a brothel, her abusive step father turns into a paedophilic priest with, naturally, an Irish accent, Blue turns in to a shiny suited, tiny moustached pimp. It’s good that Hollywood still uses to the Irish accent to convey a certain ecclesiastical evil. It’s good that we’ve imported more than just drunk writers and corrupt bankers over the years, isn’t it? It was a proud moment, like when Brenda won that Oscar or all those Hollywood films with IRA blokes, Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones and who have you, back in the nineties.
Into this sleazy bordello/dance club, where ladies dress in hot pants, and dance and shag for money, (because, clearly, on some level all women fantasise about being prostitutes, right?), Babydoll descends. Unimpressed with a career path in harlotry she concocts a plan of escape, co-opting four other young ones in on her mission. They agree to go along despite having no personalities or motivation and armed only with winning smiles and legs from here to ya ya. They need to appropriate certain objects from the various sleezes around the club, and to distract them Babydoll dances to some awful music. While she dances, she slips deeper into fantasy, a dream within a dream, and her fantasies become crazy fight sequences against incredible foes; massive Samurai, the Boche, some silver robots, a dragon, and as each is vanquished, so each aspect of the escape plan is achieved. Or not. It’s super-slowed down; spent cartridges arc for an age in the air, choreographed moves, like violent ballet, show off various knickers, extraordinary things happen while all along Scott Glenn looks like a preserved raisin and dispenses wisdom. It’s really quite dull, and I wondered when it would all end. Frankly if I weren’t bound to get to the end of it, I wouldn’t have. It’s visually stunning, for sure, but fails to engage the brain, and everything is smothered in noise and music and artifice. The girls are scantily clad, spending all the film in mini skirts, and it comes across like the kind of thing that the police would find outlined, with fat-breasted illustrations, in a dog eared notebook in the knapsack that Eric Harris used to carry all his ammunition in prior to deciding to kill everyone. It’s a high school outsider flick for the ADD generation, wank-fodder for twenty-something adolescents.
And the music! Non stop music. Each new mission and dance presaged with yet another awful cover version, sickening misinterpretations of classics, like Search and Destroy by the Stooges, mangled, or White Rabbit by the Airplane, fucked. The film at times seems like little more than the commercial to sell its own soundtrack. It’s a convoluted, confused, egotistical mess of ideas and visuals, bound by no rules. But how can this be? we stutter, how does that happen? we ask, confusedly. It’s fantasy, we’re told. But why are the characters two dimensional and irritating, and why could I not care less if they all lived or died, and what’s up with the end, that’s just fucking nonsense, and the narrated coda is just the lyrics to The Greatest Love Of All but written by a confused sixteen year old on the front of her biology folder one wet afternoon down the back of the library during a free class, right?….. But it’s fantasy…we’re told. It’s a fantastic load of barse. At least The Last Seven has an excuse for being terrible, this was just charmless fudge.
Zack Snyder divides the critics. His remake of Dawn of the Dead, while undoubtedly exhilarating, seemed to miss the entire point of the original. Watchmen was so literal it lacked nuance, and, despite one of the greatest graphic novels of all time as his source material, it was dull. There’s something in Snyder’s work that always seems to be missing the point, or it’s me who’s missing his point, not being fourteen. As a one time director of commercials, he clearly knows how to appeal to people with no attention span, and a commercial is what Sucker Punch feels like all the way through. There’s no space, no time, no reflection, no characterisation, there’s just action sequences and music, neither of which represent “plot” or “narrative”. But perhaps I’m wrong in this, perhaps plotting, narrative, dialogue and characterisation are now the poor cousins of stunning visuals and sumptuously choreographed fighting. After all it’s Snyder who’s the minted Hollywood professional, and I’m clearly showing my age. Go back to the sepia tone and the tongueless kiss, granddad. Go back to Jimmy Cagney’s fifteen minute death throes, why don’t you. This is modern cinema, brash, loud, soulless, immediate and obvious. So like life. Back in my day….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…snore….zzzzzzzzzzz…sorry what? An exploding Zeppelin you say? Oh, okay then.
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