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Locked up in a mental asylum by an abusive stepfather a young girl, who we will only know as Baby Doll, ventures to a fantasy world in her head with a couple of her friends in order to find a way out of this institution before she has to undergo lobotomy which is scheduled in five days time. There are actually three worlds here and their borders are blurry. First there is the supposedly real life world of the asylum which she supposedly envisions as some sort of strip club where she and the other patients are all performers. That is the second world while the third is the one she goes to when she dances and apparently puts everybody watching into a trance. This is a world where she leads four other girls into dangerous battles all to retrieve a different item each time needed to escape from the asylum before the so-called high roller comes.
As you can see, and is clear pretty quickly, most of his movie takes part in the head of Baby Doll and in this “Alice In Wonderland with machine guns” the visuals are first rate, though it’s very obvious that a lot comes out of the computer. Director Zack Snyder has made a name for himself very quickly. Creating a more than decent remake of Dawn Of The Dead he made movies like 300 and Watchmen, both which presented his significant style to world. Movies shot mostly if not all in front of a green screen with CG-backdrops, extreme close-ups and slow motion. Snyder is more interested in visuals than anything else, though he does use or in this case writes coherent stories. It’s no surprise then that this movie holds a very distinctive look and is once again shot beautifully. In some way I think it might even become a cult classic in the future, a movie that will inspire toy producers to keep on producing material like movies as The Terminator, RoboCop, Horror Franchises etc all still do even though some of them haven’t released an installment in a franchise in 20 years. I still want an ED-209 model on my shelve here.
The movie is basically a video-game. Baby Doll and her equally hot girls battle dragons, Nazi’s and whatnot in order to retrieve an item need for their escape. The fantasies are structured like levels in a game and after defeating a boss or completing a task like defusing a bomb the level is completed, the item in their possession and it’s up to the next level until they come upon their final opponent.
A loofa of effort went into how the movie looks, but sadly the storyline is kind of flat though it’s made to look like there’s more to it. Even a not so surprising twisty ending can hide the fact that the majority of the movie consists of four hot chicks running around in skimpy outfits in a fantasy world. Like Alice In Wonderland or The Wizard Of Oz it’s a nice journey, but in the end nothing much has happened.
The fantasy world and video game structure reminded me of Super Mario Bros 2 in which, as it turns out at the end of the game, Mario has been dreaming all along. It was a beautiful world as well but it has something Sucker Punch didn’t have: the ability to participate. Sucker Punch is great to look at, but a bit like when someone is showing you a game. You don’t want to watch, you want to join in.
