300 D-Cup
Sucker Punch
Directed by Zack
Snyder
Runtime: 109 min.
Jake Nava—the wildly
erotic music video director, responsible for fine-tuning Beyoncé’s ecdysiast
routine in “Crazy in Love,” “Baby Boy,” “Naughty Boy,” “Single Ladies,” also
turning the same trick for Kelis in “Milkshake,” Shakira in “Beautiful Liar,”
Kylie Minogue in “Red Blooded Woman” and Britney Spears in “My Prerogative”—probably
dreamed of making a big screen extravaganza like Sucker Punch where female sexuality is vigorously, musically unleashed.
But Zack Snyder beat him to it, applying post-Madonna female objectification to
the bellicose video-game mentality that now infatuates Hollywood.
It’s almost
ingenious. The stream-of-consciousness “plot” in Sucker Punch resembles one of Nava’s music video premises where a
girl’s sexual power stirs in response to masculine threat: Babydoll (Emily
Browning) is imprisoned by her rapacious step-father in a jail-like institution
managed by Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino), a whorehouse/ballet instructor type,
who refers to psychotherapy as “The Theater.” Babydoll bonds with other
stripper-name teen captives, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone),
Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung), to outwit predatory warden
Blue (Oscar Isaac). Their escape is affected by Babydoll’s performances in The
Theater, however, her routines are not musical numbers.
Snyder turns
Babydoll’s song cues into a transparent excuse for the hyperbolic action
spectacle at which he is so gifted. Babydoll’s survival instinct—paced to metal
versions of Eurhythmics, The Smiths, Queen, Iggy Pop and Bjork—becomes
distinctly vengeful. What Jake Nava can do with hips and bosoms, Snyder can do
with projectiles and explosions. Babydoll and her miniskirted crew battle with
gigantic samurai, WWI zombies, medieval vandals and futuristic
Terminators.
Before you can joke
“Babydoll dreams like a teenage boy” (she stands rigid on stage, then closes
her eyes), it becomes obvious from the avoidance of dance, flirtatious camp
humor or any feminine filigree beyond lingerie, that Sucker Punch is actually about Snyder’s penchant for eroto-violence:
300 D-cup. His idea to meld antiquity
myths and warfare with soft-core in 300
was unexpectedly brilliant—updating Tarantino’s genre self-consciousness yet
maintaining a fantasy mode that did not offend political reality. He responded
to the post-9/11 sense of military history and stayed true to a psychosexual
essence. Snyder’s eroticism (especially 300’s
homoeroticism) triggered something in fanboys that Tarantino never could: a
purely, openly psychological dream of potency.
Sucker Punch is not similarly convincing because it is not convincingly feminine.
(Imagine a boy playing with dolls as if they were tin soldiers.) Snyder doesn’t
quite have Jake Nava’s knack for turning voyeurism into feminine compassion.
It’s bloody but without menstrual awareness; just as its musical pretext
neglects to express genuine feminine trauma or yearning. The girls are like Charlie’s Angels—featuring Scott Glenn as
a guardian—doing a Kill Bill remake.
Fatally, Sucker Punch has no divas.
Browning, Cornish, Malone, Hudgens and Chung are a third-rate, petulant bunch.
Imagine Beyoncé, Shakira, Kelis, Kylie and Britney in these roles! Better yet,
go back to Milla Jovovich’s Amazonian power in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Afterlife. Despite their
little-girl-wearing-Mommy’s-make-up stylization, these actresses aren’t fierce
like the icons in 300. This neuters
Snyder’s video-game logic into a kid’s game.
With Sucker Punch, Snyder returns to the
nonsense of Watchmen rather than the allegorical poetry he beautifully
displayed in Legend of the Guardians: The
Owls of Ga’hoole. That doesn’t mean Sucker
Punch isn’t startling; the behemoths, zeppelins, pneumatic zombies full of
hot air, the rush of stroke-book imagery, music video panache and comic book
violence into non-stop delirium is still visionary stuff. If an insipid
psychodrama like Shutter Island can
become a hit, Sucker Punch deserves
to live up to its name.