Sucker Punch (2011)

This movie does not make a lick of sense. For starters, the film is directed by Zack Snyder, who set the phrase ‘style over substance’ in stone. He says that he has been planning this movie for years, I’ve even heard that he’s been working on this idea since he was a teenager. This is his dream project. In the 2010s, there have been two directors with pretty respectable resumes, and they both made their dream project involving dreams. The first was Christopher Nolan, who made his dream project last year with Inception. While I didn’t love it as much as other people did, I still find it a very enjoyable film. But the next one is Zack Snyder, king of slow-motion. This is the first Zack Snyder film I have ever seen. I’m not a big fan of hyper-stylized films, so-yeah. I’ve never seen 300, or Dawn of the Dead, or Watchmen, any of them. And after seeing Sucker Punch, I plan never to. Directors tend to bring their all to their dream project; they pull out all the stops. This film has some sort of a plot, but I don’t care enough to explain it for you. So here’s the abridged version-A girl goes completely insane. That’s all you need to know. Because the rest is too insane and convoluted, it hurt my head. You know? I’ll actually try to explain the plot. In the 1950s, a girl (Emily Browning) goes to a mental institution after accidentally killing her sister; and the mental institution seems to be like some kind of training for striptease, I don’t know. Either way, they have to do this dance, and in order to complete this dance, this girl goes into an imaginary world. From this moment on, she should have been put away by herself, she is mental. But no. Apparently her dance is amazing, because…killing zombie robot Nazis in your mind is a great dance? Either way, she needs to escape, and she enlists the help of four other girls (played by Vanessa Hudgins, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung) to help her. They then need to collect five items in order to escape, told to them by a strange man who reminded me a little bit of Frank Langella in The Box. The writing of this film is just awful. Obviously, the story is a complete mess. But some writers could have made it work. Not here. Also, the directing is decently atrocious. I’m pretty sure that they only had the green screen for a few days, so they filmed half of what they needed, and then had to slow it down to make for a good running time. Some other directors could have ever taken this awful script and made it good. If Edgar Wright, JJ Abrams, or Duncan Jones made this, it would be pretty cool. But here, nothing. Actually, that’s not true. There were some moments in the middle of the film where it was actually pretty cool, and then I was sucked in. But five minutes later, the film went back to real life out of dream land and I was mad again. But, I started to warm up to it eventually and actually started enjoying myself. But then that ending…oh, that ending…It makes even less sense, and is so completely unnecessary that I wanted to scream. But I was watching it on my iPod on an airplane, so that might bad idea. Wait, there is one more thing I can say that is good about the film. I really hate flying in planes, and the film made me not want to vomit or freak out. But honestly, any film could have helped me with that. So an accomplishment? Not so much.
2.5/10