If I was to describe Sucker Punch in a single word, it would be this: disappointing. Now the reasons for my disappointment aren't as simple as "the movie was just bad." On the whole sucker punch isn't bad per se, it had a lot of potential and it just didn't deliver on that, hence the disappointment. When I first saw the trailer, I thought "hey, this looks like an interesting idea and with Zach Snyder at the helm, it should be well executed." Now I will admit that I made a mistake in assuming the movie would be good just because a director I liked was working on the film. I've been disappointed before in cases like Kurt Wimmer and the award winning stinker Ultra Violet.
Admittedly, I should have taken a clue from the fact that Zach Snyder had only directed 4 full length films before working on Sucker Punch. 300 was sort of idiot proof because it had such a simple concept, although I know all the historians were booing and hissing fervently the entire time. Watchmen was really good and was even well received critically, but maybe that's only because some of the writing was done by Solid Snake......I mean David Hayter (who knew?). Just because a writer or director has some titles under his/her belt that you liked, doesn't mean that they will always put out solid material.
So anyhow, the movie itself is not bad, it just fails to make the most of what I felt was a significant amount of potential. The first and strongest item in the films inventory was its concept: young girl gets thrown into a desperate situation and copes with the stress by shifting her perception of reality. This concept is not wholly novel, Donnie Darko did the same thing in essence, but executed the concept more deftly because it had actual character development and a plot that felt like it had some actual depth. The problem with this concept in Sucker Punch is that very little is explained, which is fine, but then the pacing falls through. You have these brilliant set pieces for the major battle sequences, but you jump in and out of them so rapidly and it feels like its coming out of no where, so I end up not really caring about these dramatic shifts in perceived reality by the characters.
The pacing seems to speed up appropriately for the major battle sequences, but there just isn't any dramatic buildup or tension leading up to the event. Its just like: moving along, nothing too special, then.....holy crap! Fighting zombie Nazis! This sort of lag and jump is fine for video games where you as a player determine the speed at which events unfold, but it simply doesn't work for a movie. The dramatic portions feel like their only there to act as bridges between the giant battle sequences, almost making them seem superfluous.
When I first saw the trailer, I made a prediction of sorts that the movie would rise or fall on the merits of the actors. However, there's very little acting in the movie. All the dialogue is short, there's no real character development, the back stories all made sense, but they were so brief I just didn't care, and finally there were the shifts in perceived reality themselves. As a frequent movie goer and a nouveau cinephile, I get the idea that the protagonist in the story alters her perception of reality to cope with the harsh situation that she's in, but if you were just passing by, it wouldn't make any sense at all. You have these dramatic shifts in reality, but only once do you really get a sense of how that shift is affecting actions in true reality. The rest of the time, you just get the appearance of crazy stuff happening without a lot of obvious correlation to the plot.
Sucker Punch would have been a lot better off if it had simply ditched the action over tones and gone it alone as a dramatic work. The harrowing story of a young girl trying to escape from an insane asylum after being imprisoned there by her evil stepfather is interesting enough. And maybe if they had done that, Emily Browning could have had some actual dialogue and a chance to really act.
On a final note, I feel that one place the movie really fell through was that they decided to go for a PG-13 rating. I understand that movie studios are out to make money and that going with a PG-13 rating is a way to reach out to a wider audience, but in this case I feel that it really tied hands creatively and ended up watering down what should have been really aggressive segments of the movie that in all honestly should've dialed up the gore and profanity and gone for the gold with an R rating. Obviously going for an R rating doesn't magically make any movie better, but I have the strong sense that in the case of sucker punch, it would only have made the movie more believable.
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