sucker punch

What it is:

– Zack Snyder’s wet dream

– A thirteen-year-old boy’s screenplay

– A videogame that thinks it’s a movie that thinks it’s a videogame

– A pastiche

– Shutter Island on crack colored with Watchmen

– A hot mess

What the hell:

– Ah, mental illness. You can do crazy things with it. (Pun intended.)

– Structure’s simple enough, and actually becomes predictable after a few scenes. I liked the silent movie sequence in the beginning. After that, protagonist is taken to a mental hospital. More slow-mo, silent movie shite. Then lobotomy scene! Then bam! Fantasy world! It’s like Pan’s Labyrinth really, the fantasy world as escape from the Awful Real World, except that they wear leather.

– Funny thing, though, inside the fantasy world, whenever she begins to dance, bam! Another layer of fantasy world! Like Inception!

– So A) Real World, B) Fantasy World, where they’re maids/dancers/courtesans, C) Secondary Fantasy World, where they go on several missions to retrieve a map, a lighter, a knife, and a key.

– It would have worked if the movie lingered longer in A, and showed us the actual interactions of the girls with each other. Then we could have a map (lol our own map) we could use to wade through B and the craziness and the shrill over-the-topness of C.

– Pan’s Labyrinth and Shutter Island (and even The Cell!) had the same themes, and they contained references to the real world of the tortured protagonists. Baby’s sister and mother is absent in all of the mindscapes. How can that be? And how come the stepfather only appears as a priest, for God’s sake. And why the dragons and the orcs and the blown-up city? Why the “mission” structure? Why a dance? Without the references, everything is just random, gratuitous shit.

– Yeah, yeah I know lighter, dragon, Rocket getting stabbed in B and getting blown up in C, but that’s about it.

– Character development, nil. So many women, and Blue is the only true character! Remember when he says, “I don’t like guns”? I laughed.

– Was the VO script written by Nicholas Sparks?

– Do I hate it? No. I’ve seen worse. It’s entertaining, in its own way. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers would spend so much time/money on something like this (it IS eye candy, you know) and didn’t even stop to consider THE FUCKING STORY.

The end.

I like the soundtrack.