This IS a Sucker Punch review: Empowerment shouldn't be so depressing

Ever since I was a little girl my id has been something of a complete dipshit. When all the other girls were avoiding the proliferation of huge tits-tiny bikinis-big swords books that seemed to flood a quarter of the comic book shelves in the 90s as sexist garbage a small voice in the back of my head would always whisper, "But they're superheroines ... they can't be that bad, right?" This may go a long way toward explaining why I grew up to make a blog called "Chicks Who Kill Things" and not something like "Enlightened Discourses on How to Further the Role of Strong Genre Fiction Heroines in Urban Fantasy, Comic Books and the Culture at Large." While I can always fault this tendency -- it's true my first comic was a Jim Balent Catwoman -- it sometimes leads to good results -- I'm really glad I started reading comics. Yet it sometimes leads to bad results, like an urge to see this movie.

Sucker Punch has gotten terrible, terrible reviews. As I write this it's got a 20 percent fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com. I can't imagine this review is the first of those you've read, but in case it is, the movie follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who has been framed for the murder of her younger sister and imprisoned by her stepfather in an insane asylum, where she's due to be lobotomized in five days. To deal with the pain, Baby Doll mentally escapes into an alternate reality where she's actually in a brothel and is due to be sold to "the high roller" in five days. In this reality the psychiatrist becomes her madam (Carla Gugino) and the head of the hospital the evil, slimy head of the brothel (Oscar Isaac). In the brothel she meets five other girls, Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Baby Doll is also made to dance, and at the madam's urging when she dances she goes within herself to another fantasy, this one where she's a sailor suit-clad fighter in a world that crosses just about every genre well-loved by nerds. In this fantasy a wise man (Scott Glenn) tells her she and her friends can escape if they find five items: a map, fire, a knife, a key and an unknown item that will require a great sacrifice.

A lot of pixels have been spilled on how much this movie panders to a geek audience and a male geek audience in particular. Let me tell you right there that this is not why this movie is bad. This movie is bad because it has a girl and her friends cutting open samurai giants and steampunk zombie Nazis and a dragon in a castle and robots on a train set to blow up a futuristic city and yet it is totally, completely not fun. Okay, well, it's mostly not fun. When they found the fire and lit the fire in the nerd mashup fantasy world I was like, "Wow, that fire looks really pretty." That may have been the only time I had fun.

There are a couple of reasons the movie falls apart for me. The first is that director Zach Snyder seems to have spent way more time thinking up the story/visuals than the characters. Baby Doll doesn't speak for about 10 to 20 minutes of the movie and is mostly a passive presence, staring at everything with a wide-eyed, lips pursed expression of beaten down, beautiful fear. When she finally starts talking the movie is more concerned with moving the plot forward than the emotions of her or any of the other girls, who are called on to either be fighting badasses or to look scared and cry a lot. Snyder tries with the sister relationship between Rocket and Sweet Pea but that never feels like it gets to the emotional level it should. The action scenes just aren't very good, either. They're usually confused and muddled and shot through a brown filter that makes everything look the same despite the very different locales. Reviewers have compared the action scenes to video games, but that's not really fair. I felt more connection to Heather from Silent Hill 3 (which also has a plot where the character descends to an evil world and then a still eviller world, I guess) than I ever did to Baby Doll.

Even if they were great, though, they'd have an uphill battle in overcoming the nauseating "brothel" plot. Now, I will say this for Snyder, I do get the impression that however flawed the movie is, he and the actresses think it's empowering. Even though I rolled my eyes at shots like Baby Doll's high-heeled "battle" shoes and how every outfit was some sort of sexy black hell, I did feel like the film at least likes its female characters and feels sympathy with them, as opposed to something like Frank Miller's The Spirit movie which has tough female characters and doesn't seem to like them too much but thinks it can fall back on "But they can fight!" if anyone accuses it of sexism. Like the scene between the Comedian and the first Silk Spectre in Watchmen, all of the scenes of men threatening or killing helpless women are appropriately horrible. (Speaking of which, man, I hope Snyder took Gugino out to a lot of fancy but professional dinners where he said "thank you" a lot in between these two movies.) I appreciate that but I don't appreciate how much time we spend in the horrible scenes. Watching this movie I didn't feel empowered at seeing women fight monsters, I felt depressed at seeing women get killed and nearly raped by men.

Also, the even the mashup scenes of empowerment seem somewhat hollow since they're led by a man in all of it. I don't understand what Glenn's was supposed to represent or why he was there, other than to be the "good" man. I have to admit while watching the movie I made up a fake backstory where he's actually Baby Doll's real, dead father. Despite the ending, I still want to believe that bit of fanon.

This is a concept that really needed to either go campy or needed a Tarantino-like touch to work. It needed to either be big and ridiculous like a Russ Meyer or John Waters film so its uglier moments could go down easier, or the characters needed more time to talk and grow inner lives like they do in most Tarantino films -- admittedly I'm thinking more the Tarantino of Kill Bill than the Tarantino of Death Proof, where the talking goes nowhere, but that's another story. At any rate, though, the movie needed to be big and fun, the movie needed to be worthy of a name like Sucker Punch.

I will throw the movie a bone, though. I didn't hate the ending as much as some people did. HUGE SPOILERS BELOW.

At the end of the movie, which comes after all the non-blonde heroines are dead (sigh), Baby Doll realizes in the "brothel" layer of the plot that what she has to sacrifice is herself, and by doing so she'll allow Sweet Pea to live. Her decision has repercussions in the "insane asylum" layer of the plot, where she gets lobotomized. The lobotomy was supposed to be authorized by Gugino's character and when she discovers this she has Isaac's character, who forged her signature, arrested. So the implication isn't that Baby Doll gains freedom through a lobotomy, but that she's sacrificed herself so that not only Sweet Pea will live but that life in the asylum may get better for the inmates. It's not a story of self-empowerment (at one point Baby Doll explicitly says it's not her story), but the story of the empowerment of others. It also has a degree of symmetry, as Baby Doll failed to save her sister at the beginning of the story but manages to save another girl who's lost a sister, as well as many others.

Granted, I would have felt better about this if they'd given Baby Doll a stronger personality from the beginning though, maybe making her a sort of McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest to the other girls. So I can't help but feel depressed at how it all went. Very, very depressed.