Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is the director's first totally original film with all his other efforts being adaptations of existing material. And it is fair to say the whilst the visual flair remains his handling of the narrative is fumbled and the overall tone of the film suffers from some questionable decisions.
So looking at the positive the film is fairly impressive visually, it of course features plenty of Synder's trade mark slo-mo interspersed with blasts of sped up action but beyond that the film has a nicely 'aged' look and is probably the closet thing yet to a comic book brought to life - a lot of the shot setups seem heavily reminiscent of comic panels.
Alongside this the film as an excellent soundtrack which is used to great effect in a number of sequences and it's when this combination is in action that film works best, particularly in the opening sequence which you can see below. (And does seem to be an emerging pattern that the best part of Synder's films are the opening five minutes).
But if you look a little deeper what you find in amongst all the bombast and breathless action is a group of underwritten characters moving through a story that would be lightweight for a videogame. The central characters are all pretty much cookie cutter set-types; the quiet but determined one, the cautious one, the naive one, the gung-ho one and in fact Jamie Chung's Amber and Vanessa Hudgens' Blondie barely get any lines at all.
Emily Browning, Jena Malone and Abbie Cornish are a little better served but not by much and they are all somewhat undermined by being required (by a frankly pointless part of the setup) to spend all their screen time dressed in tottering hells and fishnets. This is because the fantasy action sequences are bordered on two sides by the asylum in which Browning's BadyDoll ends up in and the bordello she for some reason imagines it as.
The film would work well enough without the bordello aspect, why not simply paint the asylum as a nightmare worth escaping, which only seems to serve to sexualise proceedings needlessly. And the less said about the fact the girls' escape plan revolves around distracting men via Babydoll's dancing the better. I'm sure it's supposed to be a female empowerment thing but I don't think it really works.
It is true that the film has somewhat more interesting ending to it that I expected halfway through and comes to a close on something of a low key note but sadly whilst Synder is undoubtedly a showman but here fails to successfully draw the three lines of reality cohesively together.
In the end it plays out like a sequence of set pieces strung together and hung a skeletal frame which has the potential to be much more developed than it is. Which is precisely what it is since Synder admits to thinking up the various set-pieces first and then writing around those.
So I'd say if you're going to see it, see it on the big screen where the look and soundtrack can have their full impact since there isn't much beyond that.
