Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2011)

“It’s like we talked about,you control this world.Let the pain go,let the hurt go,let the guilt go.“

So here is Sucker Punch; Zack Snyder’s much maligned psychological action movie / feast of misogyny.

There is no getting way from the fact that this film sails in some murky waters.  The protagonist (a girl called Babydoll and dressed accordingly) is sent to a mental institution after she fights back against her stepfather’s advances on her and her sister.  In order to escape the institution’s abuses she imagines that she being held in a burlesque house / brothel and when she dances she escapes further into her own mind and into a land of fantasy battles which include dragons, giant samurai and steam-powered undead soldiers.   Okay, so we have sexual abuse (all slow-mo and soundtracked to death) from which a character chooses to flee into a slightly brighter world of, drumroll please, sexual servitude.  Yay!

…and yet for the all the creeping suspicion (i.e. downright jump out in-front of you, hit you with a two-by-four obviousness) that you should not be enjoying this film, that both the villains and the filmmaker are up to their necks in all sorts of sleazy no good it remains a great piece of cinema.  This is a director spewing his brains out in glorious fashion and, let’s face it, if this film was subtitled we’d be having a conversation about how Hollywood can not and will not make films like this.

Sucker Punch is available on DVD.

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