Sucker Punch
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| © Warner Bros Pictures |
Props where props are due: the wordless opening is the movie's high point. It's scary, atmospheric, and moving in all the right ways. And then her horrible step-father? guardian? lawyer? hauls her off to the insane asylum. Now, right away we hit an issue for me: I get that she's aggrieved, but just keep shooting, okay? The bad man wants to hurt you, so keep shooting until the gun runs out of bullets.
Our protagonist (Emily Browning) doesn't have a name at this point, just a nickname she picks up further down the rabbit hole. And since that nickname is Baby Doll, I'm not all that inclined to use it. Lacking better options . . .
As a result of the abuse heaped upon her in Level 1 (asylum, a.k.a reality), Baby Boll creates Level 2 (cabaret). I want to be very clear about this: Level 2 exists in Baby Doll's mind. It's an escape. So you might think that it would be, in some way, an improvement over the first level. It's not. It's better lit and possibly cleaner, but it's in no way better. Instead of being abused by the employees of the asylum, the girls are sex slaves at a cabaret/burlesque club.
That's where Level 3 (anime/WWII mash-up) comes in. Because of all the sex slavery, Baby Doll creates a third level within her mind. The movie is very clear that Baby Doll knows it isn't real and can enter this level of her own volition. It's all sailor scouts and dragons and zombies, which is pretty cool. A movie still filled with gaping plot holes and random infantilization, but I guess an elite squad of modern day Amazons can't be perfect. Here's the the part that I don't follow. Level 1 is horrible, so she needs an escape. Level 3 exists within her mind, and she has the power to access it. So why does the equally horrible in-betweener Level 2 even exist? Beyond giving Oscar Isaac something to do, that is. He's fantastic as dirty David Krumholtz, but that's neither here nor there.
Two reasons. One has to do with the plot, and the other reason, which I suspect is of greater significance, has to do with objectification. See, when people are unjustly institutionalized and abused, you feel bad about objectifying them. Same goes for the cabaret. They're being forced to dance (only dance, in Baby Doll's case, though it's a metaphor), but she still needs to escape the escape of her own creation. So she goes to another world where everyone is still in skimpy costumes. On the plus side, they know kung fu. So when they're running around in short skirts and garters and skin-tight everything with a samurai sword or bazooka, you don't have to feel as bad about objectifying them because they're empowered (except for the part where they're not) and because hey, it's not real anyway.
It's Level 3 and Level 3 ALONE that Baby Doll gets the instructions/picks up the tools to help her escape the cabaret. At the very end of the movie, we find out that they were actually using them on Level 1 to escape the asylum like it's some big significant REVEAL. But we already know that Level 2 doesn't exist, so it must bear some relationship to Level 1 or else what's the point of everything we just watched. Maybe I put too much stock in the audience's intelligence, but I'm pretty sure if the girls ran around picking up a map, fire, a knife, and a key in Level 3, we could guess what they would be used for. But then we'd have to watch them escape (and in some cases die) in the grungy real world instead of the bustiers and sparkly tights of Cabaret Land, so we'd be right back to feeling guilty about the objectification. As reasons for getting away with leering at pretty young things go, that's pretty gross.
The worst of it is that I think Zack Synder's a fairly talented visual stylist, so I wish I could go to his house with my crayons and construction paper and storyboard a simple tale for him (like how in the world I found his house in the first place). At the end, I would say, "And that's a narrative," and it would blow his mind. But until then, his fundamental lack of storytelling skill will never make up for his letting his fanboy salivating run wild. Down, boy. D
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| © Summit Entertainment |
Since that guy is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, you've got a delightful amount of imagination on display. When you pair him with Michelle Monaghan, you get a nice little lesson in chemistry as a bonus.
The movie has this fantastic built in cheat: because they need Captain Colter Stevens (love that name) to stop an imminent terrorist threat, they don't have time for his questions or his Swiss cheese memory. It's 24 by way of Quantum Leap, and Dr. Samuel Beckett himself gets a voice cameo complete with signature catchphrase. The "they" in question is Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright, who shows up to say stuff like, "The mind is like a light bulb," which makes just enough sense that you think, "I get that . . . wait, what?" BOOM! The bomb goes off, and we start all over.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn't go quite go like gangbusters, and gangbusters is what you need in this situation. There's time-outs for pseudo-science, and eventually Monaghan runs out of new ways to say, "I took your advice. It was very good advice," without making you want to slap someone.
And then. Oh, boy, and then. It's not that Gyllenhaal couldn't earn that conclusion though sheer force of charisma, and it's not that the movie as a whole doesn't do a far better job of earning its happy ending than The Adjustment Bureau. It's that I can't figure out what makes Captain Colter Stevens better than the rest of us or what will happen next. If I could find the pulse of one of those ideas, I might let the other one go, but I can't on either point. I don't feel like they broke free and created a new mirror world (the bean, the bean, always back to the bean). I feel like they created a cycle that will carry forward every time America faces such a crisis. Send in Captain Colter Stevens (can't stop saying it) and his wily imagination, and he will get to Farmiga every time. She'll let him alter reality every time. And there he will be, loose, stealing yet another life from someone who . . . ceases to exist? No, seriously, where is Sean Fentress? Is he trapped inside while Colter Stevens gets the girl, à la Being John Malkovich? Or is dead dead in any reality? And how is Stevens going to fake being a middle school history teacher? Doesn't Fentress have a family and friends who will notice a significant shift in his personality? Don't show me a movie that wants me to think then tell me stop thinking beyond the end credits.
There's a read on this movie as an inferior product to director Duncan Jones' last offering, Moon (in fairness, he didn't pen this one). It's the same story of multiples and doing a job you can't fully understand, guided by a voice that may or may not have your best interests at heart. But what it makes up for in explosions, it somehow loses in plot. It sounds obvious, but setting the story in the future is a pretty good way to get the audience to suspend disbelief. If they had picked up the pace a little and dropped some of the malarkey, they probably would have gotten away with it. B
