sucker punch

I struggled with Sucker Punch.

The problem was I felt it was trying hard to do something clever but not quite achieving it.

The clever thing it was trying to do revolved around exploitation.  There were several levels to this.  One was quite obvious - the exploitation of young women by popular culture.  This was examined through a whole series of contradictory elements such as the girls dancing and questions over empowerment.  But there were other themes - family's (natural and forced), violence (real and for titillation), the use & abuse of cultures (Hollywood's wholesale taking of tropes from other cultures), for example.

My problem came in that it was trying to have its cake and eat it.

Now I don't fundamentally have a problem with this, it's just that here it didn't quite work.

So the film is exploring the exploitation of beautiful young girls as eye candy.  It's trying to point out that this is wrong.  But it's also doing it itself.

The film is exploring the use of false empowerment - girls presented as being empowered, but actually being 'enslaved' and used.  But it's also doing this itself.

I guess the issue is that it failed to undermine these issues.  In the end it simply used them itself.  It would have been far better if it had parodied them or somehow undercut them.  It made it all feel slightly pointless.

The other issue I had was the fact that it felt like a series of individual things stuck together.  It's quite normal for action films to effectively be a series of heavily designed action vignettes that are almost glued together.  Weirdly they're like musicals in a way - there's the song and dance bits and then there's the stuff that moves you as briskly as possible between each of these.

Well in Sucker Punch this goes to an extreme with each of the vignettes feeling like an individual movie.  But this is to the extent that each one is completely different in style, tone and theme.  Indeed, each uses a particular set of tropes such that one is a far eastern thing, another is a World War 2 thing (and also a zombie thing) and another is a LotR fantasy thing.

The trouble is that the switch back and forth between these is extremely jarring.  Part of this is where the exploration of themes comes in - the wholesale plundering of other cultures, the exploitation, etc.  But the real difficult I had is that generally these are really cool.

In particular they feel like the best bits of anime, games, western comic books and movies all welded together.

I dunno, perhaps the coolness was meant to be the part that undermines the issues?  Instead to me it felt like all it did was reinforce them.