gist: violet baudelaire is sent to a mental institution for poor marksmanship. there, she dreamweaves being in a brothel where clothes-deprived girls dance to survive. (why she chose that particular fantasy, i'll never know) in this imaginary realm, she concocts the idea to escape as per a wise man's instructions in another world she had imagined while dancing. inception much? with the help of four other girls, baby doll gyrates her virginal hips for attention in the first layer pseudoworld and goes kick-ass mode in the second layer pseudoworld to obtain the five items essential to their freedom.
reaction: first, a quickie on the sucker punch hate brigade. most of the criticism seems to stems from the fact that something else was expected from the film. some wanted packed action and were put off by the ponder-prompting metaplot. some demanded taut storytelling and were bitchslapped by all the armed fighting. why oh why do these people enter the movie theater to look at a painting? yes, you paid good money to be entertained but it doesn't mean you're just going to passively sit there and wait for whatever it is you want to see or hear and curse the movie to tartarus if you don't.
anyways, sucker punch is basically alice in wonderland gangbanged by 300. girls in an imagined setting doing unreal feats. but underneath all the fist and bullet trading is a story that, although simple enough to catch, requires a deeper train of thought for proper comprehension. but even then you'd still have doubts for certain aspects point elsewhere. that feeling where you need to debate what the movie's about or to recall details that one could have missed, let's call it the "afterview". and smart moviegoers who absorbed at least the bits and pieces of the film's true meaning will be engaged in further discussions due to a lingering afterview.
the pussy parade is led by emily browning. she's lookin all grown up here. i really didnt think she'd work, never having seen her in any role like this but she played the innocent girl with a badass slut inside real well. she also smoothly flew through the fight scenes. this is her show of course but it would have been greater if the same amount of screen time was relegated to her mysteriously enthralling dance routine, which was limited to the lame sway intro. as for the deuteragonist damsels, they did their parts okay but a teeny bit more characterization would have made the turncoating valid. plus in movies like this, you really don't for high-grade acting so vanessa hudgen's wallslide crying was weird.
there are a number of action set pieces that bend reality, all awesomely executed, but my favorite is the first one with the giant shoguns. it's a great way to immerse the audience to baby doll's dance-triggered world (where they all defy gravity but land the exact same way). there's a scene in the dressing room where the girls are talking and the camera makes an impossible one-take shot. this i think encapsulates how zack snyder uses the advancements in cgi to put a skew on traditional filmmaking. the action scenes, the color correction, the shots, nearly everything he has done here is abusing the technology. years ago, none of it could be done in the same magnitude. sure, with avatar and a gazillion cgi cartoons, the envelope has been pushed a lot but snyder has distinct style that reroutes where all those rendered pixels can go. and with sucker punch, the clunks of cgi physics (especially with real human character interaction), wirework and slow-mo/fast-mos are gone, leaving a nigh-perfect jaw-detaching eyecandy overdose.
i like how sucker punch is both a fanservice to guys and a girl power push for girls. i like how the main characters are girls in whorific costumes but sensually downplayed with no ass shots or in your face boobs, integral to most action flicks. it's not a great movie but it's really not as bad as some consider. i am definitely on board for the zack snyder superman.
good: action sequences, the visuals, the "afterview"
bad: little character development, studio cuts
ugly: vanessa hudgens
verdict: 8 lobotomy needles
sweet pee/baby dull.
