My Favourite Movies: Sucker Punch

Even after watching this 5-6 times I still not really sure is this is a good, inspired, deeply flawed or simply a bad movie. I mean I loved the trailer and was hooked by the haunting melody (sung by the lead actress Emily Browning) and the totally arresting visuals. It was, at least to me, a must see movie.

On actually seeing it though I was torn. The movie is most definitely divided into two very different bits – there’s the asylum/bordello and then there’s the fantasy sequences. But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. The story, such as it is, starts with the death of ‘Babydoll’s mother (that’s Emily Browning’s character as everyone has Superhero-lite Monika’s) and her attempted murder of her stepfather whilst protecting her younger sister from him. Sent to a mental hospital (how exactly that is achieved is glossed over) she has to survive with the other inmates. But then things get a little weird – as the asylum turns into a bordello (presumably in the mind of Babydoll?) – where the girls must dance for their clients. But when Babydoll dances something strange happens which blows everyone away – oddly we never actually see any of the dances but only what’s going on in her head. OK, so now I’ve completely confused everyone I get to the good bit – and no, I don’t mean the fact that all of the women (with the noted exception of Carla Gugino who played the dance instructor/psychiatrist) spend most of their time in either underwear, dance clothes or tight leather/micro-skirts. The costume designer either was a 14 year old boy or was channelling his inner teenager here. No, the best parts (but for which the film would have been pretty unwatchable) are the four fantasy scenes which are, well I’d have to say awesome.

Each fantasy section is a fight sequence. The first is between Babydoll (wearing her iconic micro-skirt, sailor top – with midriff showing [you see what I mean] – and wielding a samurai sword in one hand and a .45 Colt in the other) fighting three gigantic – 30 feet plus – Samurai warriors. The second section (equally nonsensical) is a WW1 battle scene complete with trenches, no man’s land and biplane/triplane/zeppelin combat into with Babydoll (dressed as per) plus her three compatriots (dressed in leather and totting state of the art 21st century firepower) taken on the German army of steam powered/clockwork activated zombie soldiers (told you it was senseless). The third section involves a dragon, a castle occupied by what looks like Orcs and a B-25 Mitchell bomber with the girls on-board (again I kid you not). The final section is a bit more coherent with the attempted recovery of a bomb from a moving train via Vietnam-style gunship whilst fighting off a horde of humanoid robots. You can see how all of this appealed to my inner 14 year old geek which is probably why I happily loved about half of the movie. Interestingly I think the distributers of the DVD knew exactly what their viewers wanted as each of the fantasy sections can be accessed directly without watching the entire movie from the special features section…

So, despite a deeply confusing plot, some pretty bad acting (I can’t think of a single scene or one person in the whole film that I could describe as good acting/a good actor) and some terrible dialogue this still managed to scrape into my favourites list. The soundtrack is great and the action/fantasy scenes are some of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s just a real shame that the rest of the film holding things together was so bad/poorly executed.