Sucker Punch – Cute, but not a knock out.
I’ve been looking forward to this movie for two reasons. First, I like to write this kind of fantasy—that strange mix of reality and imagination where magic and meaning comes out where you may least expect it. Second, it looked like a good cross-genre mix of Zen warriors and steamwork machinery. Sucker Punch gave both of those, not in A-list fashion, but a pretty decent dose.
Side note: on the Sucker Punch website the reviews posted are the typical “Spectacular”, “Visual Masterpiece”, “Tour-de-Force”. When will producers realize that if you can express a great movie through one word—it’s probably not a great movie. In giving those reviews your front page, you’re doing yourself a disservice there, folks.
I’m not going to detail the movie (though if you haven’t seen it, Spoilers are below). I want to talk about the one aspect that I enjoyed most about the concept, but why it, in the end, didn’t serve the movie as well as it should have.
The movie was broken up into three levels of reality (thus the Inception comparisons). What I found interesting is the way they switched between realities with little or no explanation of how that was possible. The first switch between the insane asylum and the whore house was easy to rationalize—Baby Doll is coping. The second, between the dancing and the ass-kicking was something else. It was this switch that I liked the most. The vignettes served almost as metaphor for the dancing—Baby Doll was glorious and raw, and though you didn’t see it as dance, you saw that represented by raw ass-kicking.
I liked the balls of that setup, switching realities without bothering much to explain the why or the how. Most fantasy enthusiasts will take that leap without problem. This switch, allowing unrelated action scenes to stand in for a base scene (the dance routine) was promising. It really let the movie take unforeseeable turns and show fantastic scenes without having to draw a line of plausibility. In the end though, it didn’t serve the movie well enough.
By jumping into the action scenes, I eventually felt disconnected from the story lines. I got that this was only a representation of their tasks, and the worlds they executed these in were pretty cool, but they were so separate from the middle reality (whore house) that they were only a visual treat. Being that, eventually all the ass-kicking started to feel the same to me: Gunfight against clockwork Nazi zombies, gunfight against armored orcs, gunfight against I Robots.
Also, Carradine had to throw out a “fight, fight, fight” cheer in each scene. The first one, “those who don’t stand for anything, fall for everything,” I first heard from Glenn Beck. I have no wish to have my movie interrupted by thoughts of Glenn Beck. All the lines were meant to inspire and go with the “You have the tools to fight!” theme. Unfortunately, they were all blatantly, and unapologetically, cliché.
In the end, the reality jumps made for an interesting way to weave various settings and action together that could not have been done on one plane. However, they were too distracting and allowed the producers to focus too much on that gimmick. If you had tried to make this movie just in an insane asylum or a whore house, it would have fallen flat. The characters were too shallow—going from weak to strong in a flash with no progressive development. They could not have carried the movie on their own. And (as writer’s always know) you can’t make a movie great if your characters aren’t great. Characters make the story, not short skirts or single cuts through samurai giants.
I’ve been looking forward to this movie for two reasons. First, I like to write this kind of fantasy—that strange mix of reality and imagination where magic and meaning comes out where you may least expect it. Second, it looked like a good cross-genre mix of Zen warriors and steamwork machinery. Sucker Punch gave both of those, not in A-list fashion, but a pretty decent dose.
Side note: on the Sucker Punch website the reviews posted are the typical “Spectacular”, “Visual Masterpiece”, “Tour-de-Force”. When will producers realize that if you can express a great movie through one word—it’s probably not a great movie. In giving those reviews your front page, you’re doing yourself a disservice there, folks.
I’m not going to detail the movie (though if you haven’t seen it, Spoilers are below). I want to talk about the one aspect that I enjoyed most about the concept, but why it, in the end, didn’t serve the movie as well as it should have.
The movie was broken up into three levels of reality (thus the Inception comparisons). What I found interesting is the way they switched between realities with little or no explanation of how that was possible. The first switch between the insane asylum and the whore house was easy to rationalize—Baby Doll is coping. The second, between the dancing and the ass-kicking was something else. It was this switch that I liked the most. The vignettes served almost as metaphor for the dancing—Baby Doll was glorious and raw, and though you didn’t see it as dance, you saw that represented by raw ass-kicking.
I liked the balls of that setup, switching realities without bothering much to explain the why or the how. Most fantasy enthusiasts will take that leap without problem. This switch, allowing unrelated action scenes to stand in for a base scene (the dance routine) was promising. It really let the movie take unforeseeable turns and show fantastic scenes without having to draw a line of plausibility. In the end though, it didn’t serve the movie well enough.
By jumping into the action scenes, I eventually felt disconnected from the story lines. I got that this was only a representation of their tasks, and the worlds they executed these in were pretty cool, but they were so separate from the middle reality (whore house) that they were only a visual treat. Being that, eventually all the ass-kicking started to feel the same to me: Gunfight against clockwork Nazi zombies, gunfight against armored orcs, gunfight against I Robots.
Also, Carradine had to throw out a “fight, fight, fight” cheer in each scene. The first one, “those who don’t stand for anything, fall for everything,” I first heard from Glenn Beck. I have no wish to have my movie interrupted by thoughts of Glenn Beck. All the lines were meant to inspire and go with the “You have the tools to fight!” theme. Unfortunately, they were all blatantly, and unapologetically, cliché.
In the end, the reality jumps made for an interesting way to weave various settings and action together that could not have been done on one plane. However, they were too distracting and allowed the producers to focus too much on that gimmick. If you had tried to make this movie just in an insane asylum or a whore house, it would have fallen flat. The characters were too shallow—going from weak to strong in a flash with no progressive development. They could not have carried the movie on their own. And (as writer’s always know) you can’t make a movie great if your characters aren’t great. Characters make the story, not short skirts or single cuts through samurai giants.
No comments:
Post a Comment