Sucker Punch

Quite possibly the most obnoxiously noisy mess of a movie I’ve ever seen, Sucker Bait—excuse me,  Sucker Punch—is not without its points of interest, in much the same way that a sheep with five legs in a sideshow is interesting. In fact, Zack Snyder’s latest is kind of a sideshow in its own right—fascinating, appalling and tedious, depending on where you look. It’s as if Snyder simply dragged in everything from the attic of his mind and threw it up on the screen. It’s like an art-house jumble sale filtered through the sensibility of an adolescent video game junkie with a taste for lingerie catalogs. And its title is a misnomer. Bitch-Slapped would be nearer the mark, since, as Mr. Zappa said, the torture never stops.

It’s probably hopeless trying to make sense out of Snyder’s feverish nonsense, but let’s give it a shot. The film opens with a bad cover (the first of many bad covers) of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” over what appear to be outtakes from Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) depicting the death and funeral of our heroine’s mother. Here, we meet our protagonist, Baby Doll, played with astonishing vacuousness by Emily Browning. Seems her stepfather is cheesed about being cut out of the will, so he decides the only course is to rape Baby Doll’s little sister. At least, that appears to be what’s going on. Naturally Baby Doll tries to intervene, with Sis ending up dead. So faster than you can sing, “You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it, you won’t say nothin’ to no one ever in your life,” the hapless girl is packed off to the Lennox (get it? Eurythmics?) House for the Mentally Insane (is there some other kind of insane?), where Dad has arranged to have her lobotomized with the aid of a sinister orderly (Oscar Isaac).

That’s the set-up. The film then becomes a series of fantasies—and fantasies inside fantasies—dreamed up by Baby Doll as she awaits her lobotomy. For some reason (mostly, I suspect, to dress his actresses in PG-13 level kinky underwear), the hospital transforms into a David Lynchian brothel. The head shrink, Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino with a pretty funny Polish accent), has become some kind of madame/dancing mistress and the sinister orderly has become a pimp named Blue (think Gomez Addams crossed with Bryan Ferry in Breakfast on Pluto). Why? I don’t know, but it turns out that Baby Doll has the power to mesmerize men when she dances—or so we’re told since whenever she has a terpischorean outburst, we go into her mind, a realm made up of videogames and other people’s movies.

In this fantasy-within-a-fantasy, she meets up with a wise man named Wise Man (played by Scott Glenn as the love child of David Carradine and R. Lee Ermey), who says things like, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” and “Never let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.” He also clues Baby Doll in on what she needs to do to escape from the brothel/asylum, which involves recruiting other girls—played with varying degrees of uninvolvement by Abbie Cornish, Jean Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung. Things then devolve into videogame set-pieces—with cover songs—of the fetishized girls doing battle with videogame bogeys like steam-powered WWI German zombie soldiers, as the movie trudges its way to its ersatz “Brazil (1985) meets Shutter Island” (2010) climax.

There’s no doubt that Snyder’s seen a lot of movies—before the credits are over you’ll see nods to Baz Luhrmann and David Lynch. He’s seen Kill Bill—both volumes—and Brazil and Shutter Island and Inception and tons of anime. He also seems pretty familiar with videogames, Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs and internet porn. Whether he’s digested any of this is a debatable point, since—like one of those pop-culture-referencing animated movies—all that’s here are unfiltered slabs of his sources. His much-praised “visionary” status—mostly involving slow-motion, post-production computer manipulations, and no apparent sense of humor—fails to follow through with anything new, except perhaps misogyny dressed as empowerment. Offhand, I’d say his mouth has written a check his ass can’t cash. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexuality, violence and combat sequences, and for language.