Sucker Punched

I'm trying to figure out how I feel about Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. There are three basic problems that I'm working to overcome as I think about the movie. First is the writer and director himself. I actually liked Watchmen much more than most critics seem to have. I thought it was a visually lovely recreation of difficult source material, and if there wasn't much heart there, well, it's hard to add backstory and depth to a world that's already so richly, if sometimes inertly, populated. 300 is awful as a live-action movie—I caught the beginning on cable again recently, and it's as portentous and silly as I remember—but as narrated animation, it's slightly (I mean very slightly) more compelling. In other words, I think the record is kind of mixed.

Then, there's the subject material. Sucker Punch is about a traumatized girl locked up in a mental asylum and about to be lobotomizes who imagines that some of her fellow inmates are warriors helping her escape. I've never thought that Snyder was a director with a unique sensitivity to women and women's issues. And 1950's repression, the misuse of the mental health system, and the fantasy lives of women are definitely issues that require some sensitivity, which I think of as distinct from delicacy and squeamishness. But I am encouraged by the fact that Snyder pushed for a movie with a large number of female leads at all. I just hope they'll be people to him, as opposed to toys.

The stills that have been released from the movie don't particularly swing me in either direction that question. The girls are undeniably cheesecake, complete with lollipops, fishnets, and plunging leather necklines. But are they cheesecake of their own imagination and invention? Or of Snyder's? Of course they're Snyder's creations, but they could be his creations in a way that shows close attention and care to what girls in that situation might have dreamed up. These aren't particularly 1950's fantasies, and I actually think they'd be more interesting if they were. That's what I worry most about this movie, that the setting is just a throwaway to add some lurid danger to the concept Snyder really wants to play with, hot girls with guns. It's fine to want to work on that concept. But if so, why not just go for it, instead of adding a tetchy frame device?