Nothing has been funnier than reading articles defending Sucker Punch, primarily because so many of the people defending it actually don’t know what the film is about, or at least don’t seem to based on what I’m reading. Kim Voynar’s defense over at Movie City News is the only one I’ve read so far that actually does know what’s going on during the video game fantasy sequences, which actually makes me even more confused as to how she can defend it… even “parts of it” for that matter.
Perhaps the worst offense though would be the combination of Scott Bowles’s review at USA Today and the following first six minutes of the film. Not only does Bowles not understand the movie, but he’s quoted — more or less out of context — in the following video saying, “You’ve never seen a movie like Sucker Punch.” His review (if you can call it that) isn’t necessarily a positive one.
Bowles’s fourth-to-last-paragraph reads, “The secret to watching Sucker Punch, like most of Snyder’s films, is to stop looking for reason. Punch is more interested in explosions than exposition.” As much as I disliked Sucker Punch it pains me to see a critic asking for more exposition when he could just spend a little time thinking and get to the bottom of things.
People are combating the negative Sucker Punch reviews saying it’s simply meant to be fun. They say this because there are explosions, guns, zombie armies, swords and more explosions. The Bowles side of the fence says it’s just a video game movie because of these things and therefore lacks meaning. Problem is, inside of that “fun” and lack of “reason” is what very few have tapped into, the rape and abuse of young girls. The worst thing you can say about Sucker Punch is that it’s not about anything, because that’s not true.
Sucker Punch is bad because it’s a poorly made film, not because it’s aimed at the fanboy sect. One defense I read said to hate it for the right reasons, even though that person didn’t even know what was going on. The right reason not to like Sucker Punch is not because it’s an “homage to geekdom” as Bowles puts it, but because it’s simply ineffective filmmaking that uses an assault of noise and CG to cover up its seedy reality.
With that rant over, here are the first six minutes of Sucker Punch as WB hopes you’ll go support the film because now that you’ve seen it’s Watchmen-esque musical opening you’ll be enticed to see more. So now tell me… do you want to see Sucker Punch now? To be honest, I wouldn’t blame you if you did. It does create a conversation, something bad movies can do just as well as good ones.
I’ll say this, I will watch Snyder’s “director’s cut”. I want to see if the terrible editing was a result of studio bumbling and I want to watch Babydoll’s entrance at the mental hospital to check out a theory of mine regarding two people that were killed point blank during the latter stages of the film. It will be painful to watch again, but I’ll do it in the name of research.
