Sucker Punch is AWESOME!! (which is bad)

Maybe my feelings about this are the result of the aging taste of a guy who never really had great taste to begin with, but I've noticed that I chafe pretty easily whenever a thing tries so overtly to be AWESOME!!

I would define AWESOME!! as what you get when you force any number of disparate yet exciting things into one package and add a rocking sound track (optional). A summary of Sucker Punch's idea of AWESOME!! is school girls fighting steampunk Nazis by way of machine guns, axes, katanas, and a mech with a bunny painted on it. Also, there is a rocking sound track.

I'm not against that, necessarily, but when that's all there is to a movie, it kind of feels like something is missing. It seems work in a trailer because, well, what else are you going to do in 90 seconds besides blast both AWESOME!! barrels at once? Spread it out to a couple of hours or so, add in the price of admission, and I start to wish that they could have thought of something besides what could have been generated by a machine programmed to randomly assemble things that are just regular awesome. It winds up feeling a little lazy and devoid of real creativity, which is a fatal flaw for something as absolutely dependent on spectacle as this movie.

Incidentally, another deadly mistake is to choreograph fight sequences in such a way as to reduce the combatant's fighting style to some variation of putting her foot out and trusting the wire-fu guy to swing her over so that she kicks the bad CG man in the face, interspersed with slow motion spinning around.

One thing I did enjoy was the awkwardness that they established, almost immediately, around sexuality. For the most part, Sucker Punch's men are all rape-thirsty grab monsters and the women are all strong yet fragile and probably virtuous. So, when the girls start dressing slutty, it is almost a challenge to the audience; a dare to find short skirts and exposed midriffs sexy.

It was a very similar awkwardness to seeing Dakota Fanning in Runaways, actually. In that movie, their manager is so vile and unwaveringly sleazy, while Fanning 's startling real-life transition from a cute-as-a-button child actor makes the thorough exploitation of her sexuality doubly uncomfortable.

In both movies, the juxtaposition of sexual pandering next to some pretty troubling conditions on the part of the people that would otherwise be objectified is interesting, I think, especially when there is a character (or several) who are more than willing to keep on objectifyin' when they should be showing a little empathy. Perhaps I only speak for myself here, but it is as if the movie were saying "all we have to do is change a couple of parameters, and this guy? That's you."

Otherwise, I'm not sure that Sucker Punch had much going for it. The fights are all imaginary, by the way, as the trailer indicates. As far as I can tell, any metaphors they might have squeezed out of the imaginary fight scenes were pretty much reduced to ordinary items defining the theme of the environment and engagement. Reasonably clever, I suppose, but it seems like a wasted opportunity not to let certain things in the imaginary world have more to say about the real world besides "that wyvern is actually a zippo".

I give Sucker Punch one conspicuously unused sword out of a possible does the fact that the Asian girl was flying in pretty much every dream fight have any significance?

BONUS: A single viewing of the trailer for Sucker Punch a few months ago reminded me of watching the Casshern trailer endlessly a few years ago. Not a bad thing at all, really, except that the Casshern trailer gave way to the foolish $80 purchase of an imported 3-Disc special edition of the movie that, as it happens, really kind of sucked. So, I resolved to not get to excited about Sucker Punch, but also to go see it when it came out. My reduced investment, both monetarily and emotionally, softened the blow, I think.

BONUS 2: There is a commercial for some bank around here talking about their overdraft protection that uses AWESOME!! It features mutant zombies etc and you fight them with a rubber ducky or something (which is why you didn't get to the bank to cover that $10 Dairy Queen charge). The duck is part of that other thing I hate, OMG RANDOM! which is also pretty lazy, but my point is that a fucking bank has this stuff figured out, so the movies really need to step it up. To paraphrase Eddie Izzard "Space is awesome, sir. / What, like a hot dog?" Sucker Punch is awesome like a hot dog.