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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Sucker Punch

SUCKER PUNCH (Zack Snyder). 110 minutes. Opens Friday (March 25). See listing. Rating: NN


Time has no meaning in Sucker Punch. And by that I don’t mean time as it pertains to the film’s setting, which is apparently the late 1950s or early 60s, though the soundtrack is entirely made up of music from the future: Eurythmics, the Pixies, Björk and the Beatles, either in covers or remixes.

No, I mean time itself has no meaning. I watched Zack Snyder’s digitally augmented action spectacle for what my watch assures me was 110 minutes, but it could have been 10 minutes or 10 days. It’s like a fugue state in there.

Sucker Punch is decked out as an amped-up spin on the old women-behind-bars melodrama, opening with a nearly wordless sequence that brings us up to speed on the main character’s issues.

Having just lost her mother to illness, teenage Baby Doll (Emily Browning) and her younger sister are left in the care of their monstrous stepfather. Since the girls have inherited everything, they’re all stuck with each other – until stepdaddy’s lechery gets the better of him, forcing Baby Doll to retaliate and landing her in a creepy facility for the criminally insane. There, she’ll be lobotomized in five days’ time – unless she can dream up a way to escape.

That’s more or less where Sucker Punch begins in earnest – or rather, where it goes batshit crazy and never looks back, spinning off into delirious fantasy sequences where Baby Doll imagines herself and her inmate sidekicks Sweet Pea (Abby Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung) battling their way through a series of video-gamey challenges involving super-samurai, First World War steampunk zombies, Orcs and a mecha army left over from the I, Robot drawing boards.

It’s all a metaphor, or something, for Baby Doll’s attempts to break them all out of the asylum before she loses her mind for real. None of it makes much sense, but it’s not supposed to. Sucker Punch is pure visual spectacle – elaborate CG vistas and bullet-time shoot-’em-ups in the style Snyder perfected in 300 and Watchmen and that movie about the owls.

It’s telling that his Dawn Of The Dead remake, which had the least digital enhancement of any of his films, remains his strongest work. Snyder’s got great action timing, and his set pieces are visually coherent and occasionally striking, but by clearly establishing them as fantasies with little to no bearing on the events inside the asylum, he renders them pointless.

And without an investment in the outcome, we have time to think about the utterly derivative nature of each sequence, and wonder how – and why – a girl in the middle of the last century would come up with them.

Why is Baby Doll hearing songs that haven’t been written yet? Why is that castle guarded by monsters from the Lord Of The Rings movies? Were they beta-testing Final Fantasy in asylums in the 1960s? Who thought steampunk zombies were a cool idea for an evil horde?

The answer to all of these questions is simple: Shut up! It’s cool! Except that it’s not, really it’s just a mashup of undercooked notions and half-assed lifts from existing films, books and games that makes no sense whatsoever when the credits roll. And over those credits: a music video for a cabaret-style cover of Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug, performed by the cast.

I’m pretty sure that happened. It’s all just a blur now.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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