Zack Snyder, no longer the fresh-footed director that gave us an honorable re-imagining of the classic zombie flick, Dawn of the Dead, has now fully transformed into a director with his own unique brand. Sucker Punch breaks the ground with separating casuals and the niched Snyder fan base. Creating his own story, Snyder shows what he's all about. When this movie ends, you'll discover that you're either suffering the effects of a 'sucker punch' with Snyder's, now, branded style, or you'll find yourself inside a now declined core group of Snyderism.
Browning, Cornish, Chung, Malone, Hudgens, sounds like a recipe, are the stars of this action-fantasy film, where a young woman, played by Browning, is about to be lobotomized as she tries to escape an asylum with her inmate friends. Of course, this film's gloriously, beautiful look is a work of visual genius. What would you expect from a former cinematographer with a background history involving music videos. Speaking of music videos, Sucker Punch is a gigantic two hour music vid-extravaganza. This movie is a train-wreck from the start. It's 'real life' breeding a fantasy of mafia, brothel owned presence, which constructs another fantasy of a setting in Feudal Japan, where all of the kick ass action takes place. Confused yet? Trust me, by the end you'll get the picture. Oscar Isaac's menacing performance and Carla Gugino are the closest thing to saving grace for the acting side of this film, which is kind of unfair to say, since the ensemble female cast really doesn't consist of much dialogue. They are just cool looking, bad ass chicks with guns and flips. I didn't really care if any or all of them lived or died or escaped.
Throughout this movie, I felt like someone was pounded my head with a ten pound sledgehammer. The problem with Zack Snyder's style of filming is that there's no direction of pace or direction on your cast. If you were a bad actor and you starred in a Zack Snyder film, no one would notice your horrendous performance, without any flow of film-making. That's what Snyderism is. The art of filming without filming.
Towards the third act of this movie, my tolerance balanced and I started to kind of enjoy this crumble of a film. Browning's character escape to fantasy from a world that no longer felt real to her over a new world of true purpose found relation to myself, personally. For me, Sucker Punch did a rope-a-dope, going from bad to worse to an okay, but not okay enough to watch again, film. You got me sucker.
