During the time when movies like Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” and Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” are becoming the eye-candy for the Academy Awards, “Sucker Punch” punches hard on its own face to stand out in the fiercely heading up Hollywood’s blockbuster.[break]
Synder’s action fantasy revolves around the story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning) who is sent to an asylum by her stepfather and is longing for an escape from her dark reality, longing for her freedom to live.
Baby Doll is sent to an asylum wrongly for allegedly committing a crime and she is made to face the prospect of lobotomy.
The characters of the movie inhabit three different kinds of worlds, which lacks proper screenplay.
The movie first explores some exaggerated reality of asylum; second, it deals with the high-class brothel, the same asylum where all characters dance to please their high-class clients; and third a world where the imagination of the characters take them on a ride where they are battling with everyone – from robots to dragons, samurai and other demons.
They are victorious every single time.
At times, it seems like director Synder went on to become overambitious as the movie feels like first watching a music video, then playing a video game, and finally all plots turn out to be a mess with no comprehension, and the narrative is haywire.
Set in the early 1960s, the movie begins interestingly, but very soon falls flat into the imagination of the director who makes the film look like a movie written by a teenage boy overnight, fantasizing about some superpowers and superheroes; written because of an overdose of Red Bull overnight.
Baby Doll in an asylum, who gives up initially and accepts her new accommodation, starts having wild imaginations that take her anywhere she wants to be at and doing anything that’s sketchy than real. Sadly, director Synder even fails to execute the thin line between imagination and reality.
It’s difficult for you to find out when is Baby Doll into her world of warrior imagination and when is she back to the asylum that she is seeking to escape from.
Our heroine Baby Doll soon turns into a female commando assembling other girls of the asylum to fight for their freedom.
The key elements for their freedom are map, fire, knife and a key. With regards to collecting them all, the female commandos then fall into a dream every time before Baby Doll begins to dance.
In their dreams, they are with samurai swords, punching the faces of robots, killing dragons and jumping off helicopters to assimilate their key elements to freedom.
This has no proper explanation to their do-or-die action scenes. The movie that is full of fantasies and delusions has nothing to say really “something.”
And if we are to talk about the visual presentation and the cinematography of the fantasy film, all Hollywood fantasy movies these days look good. They have nothing to do to justify the gravity of the movie.
Though the trailer may look appealing, the visual effects are in fact disturbing many times in their long stretches. Many fight scenes look like an overly exaggerated mortal Combat video game sequences.
Sucker Punch is a movie where the hero of the film, Baby Doll, slaughters the quietly sleeping dragon to get something from its vocal cord and then later kills its mother too because apparently she has to collect a fire as per her key element listing. In the end, it’s just a Zippo lighter that she is looking for to attain.
Though the essence of the movie – “It’s always you who have to fight for yourself to win and you have all the weapons within you to struggle for your freedom” – has weight within, if only director Synder would not have gone that far imagining all the overrated fantasies, the movie would have made some sense to its viewers.
Screening at QFX Cinema.
The writer is Program Officer at Indian Cultural Centre.
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