Fighting Evil in a Miniskirt

OK. Imagine that you’re the head of a movie studio. A director who has made you some money in the past is sitting in your office to pitch his latest project. He tells you that it won’t be cheap to make but that it will hit the right demographic. You sit back to listen.

Here’s the pitch: A hot, lush, blond 20-year-old with ponytails named Baby (Emily Browning) is orphaned when her mother dies on a dark, stormy night. Her evil, lecherous stepfather kills her sister that very night and throws her into an insane asylum. All of the other inmates there are hot, young women just like Baby. The evil head orderly, Blue (the excellent Oscar Isaac), gets paid off by the stepfather to schedule a lobotomy for Baby in five days' time. Blue also runs a brothel in the asylum where Baby and the hot, young women must dance for the privilege of servicing the customers.

Baby plans an escape and enlists the help of four other dancer/hookers. Because of Baby’s hotness when she dances, she distracts everyone who watches enough that her cohorts can gather the things they need to run away. The weird thing is that every time Baby dances, she goes into a trance, and her mind “escapes” into some kind of alternate universe. This universe looks a lot like a video game, and in the game she and her pals fight German soldiers, kill monsters and dragons and decimate robots. In the end, Baby sacrifices herself because she realizes that, without family, there is no reason to live.

But here’s the kicker, and I can’t really emphasize this enough: Baby and all of the asylum girls are dressed like strippers for the whole movie.

Now, if you’re Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros., and you’ve just heard that pitch from Zack Snyder, who also made the homoerotic comic book mega-hit 300, there’s really only one thing to say at this point: “Zack, you had me at hello.”

I’m not even quite sure what to say about Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Now you know the plot, but the movie is such a compendium of moments from other movies that I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t mention just a few. Remember the scene at the very end of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, when Jonathan Pryce finally leaves his body, and reality, and retreats into a world of his own? Or the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson is ushered into the nuthouse and presented to the evil Nurse Ratched? Or how about the scene in Flashdance, when Jennifer Beals finally gets to dance in front of the jury and become someone else? And, finally, how about those scenes in Burlesque, when the dancers bond, quarrel and compete in a dressing room painted in lady-parts colors? All of those scenes are in this movie.

Having said that, and despite the clichés that start to pile up like corpses the moment we meet Baby, there is definite fun to be had in Sucker Punch. Once you get over the fact that all of the female characters look like they just went shopping at the stripper store, there is a kind of Moxie Girlz female empowerment going on here.  I kept thinking how fun it must have been for the actresses to make this movie and feel their muscles and their sweat as they shot legions of German soldiers.  It's not often that you get to see a group of young women mowing down the enemy, even if they look like you should tuck dollar bills into their garter belts when they're done.

Sucker Punch makes me wonder what happened to action heroines such as  Ripley in Alien, who had to strip down to her underwear in the last minutes of the film but spent most of it covered up. I also wonder why all of the villains in this movie had to be sexual predators. I realize that movies are a reflection of our times, but surely there is more dimension to all of us these days than sex, violence and martyrdom. 

Four out of five Patches for visuals.